


Possible Worlds

by orphan_account



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst, But Fits Into Current Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, Fan Fiction Is Actually Part of the Case, Fanfiction, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lawyers, Light Smut, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 12:56:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 58,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18011312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “She remembered the young ADA she’d met in 1999, the trouble that refused to leave his eyes, the balled up hand in his pocket, the cigarette breath, the fear, the resignation that he’d been forced to carry too much on his shoulders.”After the Householder trial and Barba's heartbreaking departure, three seemingly unrelated cases come together, all connected to two nights in 1999 when Benson and Barba met by chance at a bar in Brooklyn, long before they were co-workers or friends.Repost of my series from 10/2018, edited for continuity, because the original was a goddamn mess.





	1. History: 1999

**October 1999**

On a chilly autumn evening, Detective Olivia Benson walked into a bar in downtown Brooklyn frequented by many of the borough’s lawyers, court employees, and higher-grade detectives. She wore her dress blues because she’d just come from the funeral of Mira Margolis, a former colleague who’d transferred to homicide back in 1994, after only two years on SVU. 

Mira had made detective first-grade before the end of her second year with homicide, became a sergeant after her third year, and had recently passed the lieutenant’s exam. She’d accepted a position heading up a precinct near the Brooklyn-Queens border. Mira was a leader, an ambitious detective whose career was going places.

Her career was supposed to have been going places.

All Benson knew, all she was allowed to know, was that preliminary evidence suggested that Mira had been murdered by her 20-year-old son Paul, and that both the Brooklyn SVU and homicide division were involved with the investigation. She’d met with the lead detective on the case two days earlier, when the autopsy was complete, to let him know that Mira’s husband, a high school social studies teacher in Bensonhurst, was extremely naive and might have become involved with the wrong people. “There’s got to be more to the story than what you’re seeing,” she’d said, and the detective thanked her but didn’t offer up any more information, even when she asked.

Cragen warned her that her badge was on the line if she got involved. Mira lived and worked in Brooklyn, and Manhattan SVU was not allowed to overstep their jurisdictional boundaries.

Benson sat at the bar, ordered a Cabernet, and opened her ears to what was around her. Halfway through her glass, she was ready to give up. All she heard were complaints about significant others, the Mets-who-let-us-down-at-the-last-second-again, and occasionally, the long working hours at the Brooklyn DA’s office. She slipped two dollars to the bartender and stood, preparing to return to Manhattan. 

In the booth behind her was a dark-haired man, maybe a few years younger than she was, probably lucky enough to still be in his twenties, hunched over a legal pad. He had manila file folders open and spread out over the table, a tumbler of what looked like scotch to his left, an electronic personal data assistant and cell phone stacked one on top of the other to his right. His tie was loosened and the top two buttons of his blue checkered shirt were open. She made him for an attorney, probably an ADA.

“Hi,” she said, sliding into the booth, sidling up next to him. 

“Hi.” He looked up only halfway, raising an eyebrow in her direction. “Are we … working … a case together?”

“No. Do you have a minute to talk? You look like you need to take a break from all this.” She caught herself overtly flirting, hoping he’d let down his guard. He was still in his twenties. He couldn’t have built up that many defense mechanisms yet. “I’m Olivia. You are …?”

“Rafael Barba. I’m an ADA with Brooklyn SVU.”

“Nice to meet you, Rafael.”

He looked back down at his legal pad and started to take notes on a case he was reading. “After much handwringing and what my mother would call agita, I just disclosed a relationship with an NYPD detective,” he said, still scribbling away, “so if you’re flirting, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Rafael Barba, Brooklyn definitely-not-a-day-over-28 ADA, had caught on to her right away _and_ was up to his ears in defense mechanisms. “I’m in Brooklyn for Mira Margolis’s funeral,” she said. “I’m not here to flirt.”

“Oh.” He dropped his pen and, blinking a few times, looked over at her. “As far as I know, I’m not the ADA assigned to that case.”

“So Brooklyn SVU really is involved?”

“I’m sorry, Detective, that’s not my —”

“Call me Olivia.”

“That’s not my place to tell you.”

“Okay, thank you, Rafael,” she said, dropping the flirtatious façade she’d put on to get information out of him. She stood, and he stood with her, shaking the hand she’d reached out to him. “Nice meeting you.”

“Same here. I’m sorry about your friend.”

His hand was warm.

Briefly — and it must have been grief, grief and sleeplessness, grief and agita — she found herself wishing she could intertwine her fingers with this stranger’s. Reflexively, she offered him a smile.

For a split second, he closed his eyes.

As she headed for the door, she turned back to glance at the man sipping his scotch and scribbling on his legal pad, wondering what he knew.

**December 1999**

She was back in the lawyer bar in Brooklyn to meet with Cal Walker, the lead detective on Mira Margolis’s case, off-the-record, off-book, so she could tell Walker that he and his boss were wrong to close the case so early, for letting the DAs office plead Mira’s son out on a lesser charge, for not looking into other possibilities before sending a young man to prison for five years for a crime he might not have committed. Paul Margolis had been like a nephew to Benson; she knew that their relationship affected her gut, but she also knew that Walker and his team had worked too fast.

After another futile conversation with Walker, Benson noticed Rafael Barba, the ADA she’d met six weeks prior, sitting at the bar, tapping on his personal data assistant with his right hand, his left hand balled into a fist.

_Go home, Liv,_ she tried to tell herself. _He’s involved with someone else in NYPD, serious enough to disclose. Head for the door._

She sat next to Barba and ordered a Cabernet.

“Detective,” he said, a half-smile forming on his face, “Brooklyn SVU is no longer involved in the Margolis investigation, and my colleague has already agreed to a plea deal with —”

“I know. I have more people to chew out later over how badly they’ve handled this case.”

“Are — are you all right?” he asked, and she noticed that his palms were now both resting flat on top of the bar.

“I will be. I want to make sure justice is done for a good detective, a good lieutenant, someone who deserved much more than the hand she was dealt.”

Barba nodded. “She will. It will, I mean.” He cleared his throat. “Justice.”

“Are you telling me,” Benson said, leaning in towards him, “Brooklyn SVU is still investigating?”

“I’m telling you,” he said, turning his body on the barstool so he was facing her, “nothing of the sort.”

“Thank you, counselor.”

“For what I didn’t tell you.”

“Yes.”

“To be honest, what I’m not telling you is — and remember, I’m not telling you this — that there were a few inconsistencies being looked at, but now that a deal has been reached, nothing else is likely to happen.”

Barba’s phone rang, and he let out a long, shallow sigh. Benson could see his hands tremble, his leg shake as he squinted at the tiny digital screen. “Got to take this,” he said. “Good seeing you again, Detective. We’ll meet under better circumstances someday, I hope.”

She patted his arm before he ducked outside. She lingered a while at the bar, sipping her wine, maybe hoping to avoid the freezing cold for a while, maybe hoping that Barba would come back.

He was in a serious relationship, she reminded herself for the third time, one serious enough to warrant disclosure.

As she walked out of the bar and headed towards the subway, she caught sight of Barba around the corner, leaning against the side of the building, his cell phone cradled uncomfortably between his ear and his shoulder, a cigarette in one trembling hand, the other hand shoved into his pocket.

“Deja que Lucia tome la decisión, por qué no puedes dejárselo a ella?” she heard him say into the phone. “Okay. Okay. Sí, naturalmente, ella dejó todo para mí.”

She willed herself not to eavesdrop. She _tried_ to will herself not to eavesdrop.

“I can’t,” he said. “No puedo. How do you — it would be like — como matarlo, y eso podría sentirse bien, God help me. No puedo. Give me two more days.”

He shoved the phone in his pocket and took another shaky drag off his cigarette. When Benson moved in closer, he sucked in a breath, a gasp almost, and in the almost-otherworldly glow of artificial city lights, she saw tears in his eyes.

“Rafael,” she said, reaching out to touch his other hand through his coat pocket, “breathe. What’s going on?”

“Private matter,” he insisted.

Nevertheless, he took his hand out of his pocket and grasped at her hand desperately. “Shh,” she said, “breathe.” She massaged his palm with her thumb. “Breathe. You’re okay.”

“Sorry,” he said suddenly, withdrawing a few steps to the side. “Lots of shit going on that I would not want to drag you into.” He threw his cigarette butt to the ground and stamped it out with his wingtip shoe. “You seem like a very sweet, very smart, very dedicated person who should not be dragged into my shit.” He smiled briefly, uncomfortably.

“We’ll see each other again,” she promised, “like you said, under better circumstances.”

“Of course.” Now his smile seemed a bit more relaxed, more genuine. “I should head home.”

**March 2000**

The spring after Mira Margolis’s murder, new evidence turned up — clear evidence, good evidence — that her son Paul had not been home when the murders were committed. Detective Walker and his partner had dismissed this alibi as a lie that couldn’t be backed up by anyone. And still, even when Benson confronted Walker in his favorite bar and brought up the fact of two new eyewitnesses, he _would not budge_. His team, and his lieutenant, would not budge. Paul had entered a guilty plea. In their view, that was the end of the story. 

And of course, Benson’s turning up the new evidence also meant she was in trouble with Cragen for interfering in a case that was well outside Manhattan SVU’s jurisdiction. “Watch it,” Cragen had warned, “you’re on track for detective first grade, you’re on track for sergeant someday, this’ll set you back ten years.”

In the bar, she looked for Rafael Barba, maybe even waited around a few extra minutes, or an hour, hoping he’d show up, knowing her actions were ill-advised since he was in a disclosure-worthy relationship with a detective, someone she hoped had comforted him about the decision that had left him wracked with guilt a few months back, who’d held him while he cried over the decisions that should have been up to Lucia, whoever Lucia was.

She remembered that overheard conversation too well. She wasn’t sure why it continued to ring in her ears, why she cared so much about the ADA who she’d only met twice, both times by chance.

**December 2000**

She visited the bar again the following winter, days after she buried Serena. She didn’t know what to make of her guilt, the sense that maybe her unwillingness to grieve made her an awful person, for her relief that Serena was gone, so she sought him out there, the man who she was almost certain had a similar sort of guilt weighing on his soul. 

She was almost certain, on account of the half-conversation she’d eavesdropped on the year before.

Deduction skills, grossly misapplied.

Gathering a bit of courage — Olivia Benson had plenty of courage, this was pure _stupidity_ she’d gathered — she asked the bartender about Rafael Barba. She said they’d worked a case together (they hadn’t) and that she had some information that might help a family with a civil suit. “I’m sure they’re having a romantic night in,” she said, feigning a familiarity she’d probably never have with the ADA.

That was how she found out about the end of Barba’s two-year-long relationship with a Brooklyn detective. Benson left the bar, gut-punched by more guilt over the fact that she’d pried into this stranger’s life simply because she’d sensed a spark between them both times their hands touched. She wasn’t sixteen years old. She knew better.

Besides, his former romantic partner, the man with whom he’d probably imagined disclosure to be Act 5 of a comedy, the final paragraph of a romance novel, was a 39-year-old detective first grade from Bensonhurst (information proffered by the bartender, not asked for, not detectived-out of him in any way) which strongly, _strongly_ suggested she wasn’t his type — right? — because she wasn’t stupid or narcissistic enough to believe everyone she was attracted to had precisely the same proclivities, the same patterns of attraction, that she did, and she was on her third Cabernet, and she was _drunk_ , and how stupid was she to inadvertently get drunk, tonight, this week, of all weeks?

She didn’t go near a bar, or a bottle, for a year after that because her own actions that night had worried her so much. 

Years later, Dr. Lindstrom would assure her that she’d overreacted, but at least she’d overreacted in the better direction.

— 

For more than a decade, she stayed away. Then, out of nowhere, Stabler retired, and within weeks, stopped returning her calls. Kathy asked her to forgive him, he’d been through too much, but soon Kathy stopped calling and e-mailing too, and it was as though her partner and friend of twelve years had never existed. Benson got a promotion to detective first grade and a new partner. 

She could move on. She could stay in the same place and move on, again, for what felt like the thousandth time. 

As Stabler’s absence burned a new hole in her heart, Benson learned that Mira’s case had gone cold. Paul’s conviction had been overturned a few years back, but not before he’d served his full five year sentence in prison. 

Mira’s case had been shelved. 

No extra scrutiny for a lieutenant who’d given her soul to the job. 

Cold, ignored, as if Mira had never existed, had never headed up a precinct, had never been murdered. 

The third time Benson returned to the bar, in 2011, she saw Rafael Barba.

Outside, the air was dry, the wind tunnels blistering painful against her face. When she opened the door, she spotted Barba near the bar, talking with a group of people, probably ADAs. His coat and scarf were on. He was on his way out.

He didn’t see her and she made no effort to draw his attention away from the three people he left with. 

She’d come to find him. 

But.

That was ridiculous, dragging her broken heart into a bar she hadn’t been to for 11 years in the hope of finding comfort in someone with whom she’d only had two brief encounters, someone who had never been her friend.

She went home. 

—

Benson heard the name Rafael Barba again in 2012, when Captain Harris mentioned his name in conjunction with the Jocelyn Paley case. She told Harris she thought Barba was in Brooklyn. When Harris said that Barba had requested a lateral transfer to Manhattan, she wondered why.

When they were introduced in court, he acted as though they’d never met.

Maybe he didn’t remember her.

Maybe he didn’t want to remember that he’d met her on what was likely one of the worst nights of his life.

She understood. Even without knowing his whole story, she understood.


	2. Another

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From here forward, everything fits into canon through S19. One small departure in this chapter, however: the events of "Flight Risk" and "Pathological" happen at the same time.

He kissed her forehead and her heart sank into her stomach, weighed down by disappointment, betrayal, another loss, another person she’d have to convince herself wasn’t worthy of her love or her despair, another, another, another.

With that kiss, with his “I have to move on,” Barba became one more _another_.

—

A few weeks earlier, when she was still on leave after Noah’s kidnapping — by Sheila, who she’d forced herself to trust, because her unwillingness to trust Sheila had been _all on her_ , all on Benson the overly suspicious police lieutenant, hadn’t it? — Barba stopped by her place after he made Mariel McLaughlin confess on the stand. _Can I come over?_ he’d tested her, and, since she’d already heard the news about Mariel from Rollins, she texted back _Of course. Come talk to me._

By 9:30, Noah was sleeping in his own room for the first time in ten days and Barba was sitting at Benson’s kitchen counter staring into his scotch. Benson’s back was pressed against the wall.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said, popping the _t_ hard behind his front teeth as he ran an index finger around the rim of his glass. “I did my job. I got the defendant to confess on the stand. McCoy’ll want to have a statue of me built in Foley Square.”

“Rafa.” She left her spot near the wall to stand behind him, to lay an open hand on his back, another near his shoulder. His muscles momentarily spasmed beneath her touch, then loosened again, with a reflexive hum escaping his throat. “Do you empathize with Mariel?” When he didn’t answer, she added: “I do.”

He hung his head.

She pressed a kiss to the back of his neck. 

“Huh.” His shoulders moved up and down, a half-hearted laugh. “That’s a longshot if you’re looking to help me get a mistrial.” He smirked into his scotch. “I don’t empathize with Mariel, but I can understand her desperation, which at this point is irrelevant, because I filed the charges I was supposed to file, and I prosecuted the way I was supposed to prosecute.”

“Which is why you’re here tonight, wringing your hands, drinking scotch in my apartment.” Her own hands were still on his shoulders. “Come on. Come sit with me on the couch. It’ll be more comfortable.”

He stood, sucking in a deep breath through his nose, letting it out in a deeper sigh. They sat together, and she curled up next to him, her head on his shoulder, and, after a few moments, his fingers lightly stroking her hair.

“A mistrial,” he said, “on the basis that you and I have become —”

“Too close.”

“On the basis of all the things I’d do for that beautiful, wicked smile. For the happy smile too, the delighted, contented smile, to be one of the lucky few who gets to see Olivia smile at least a hundred times before the sun comes up.”

“ _Smooth_ ,” she teased, and his smirk morphed into a crooked grin before she kissed his lips. “But —”

“But Optimum.”

“Optimum,” she said, settling her cheek back against his dress shirt, winding her fingers around his suspenders. 

“We have to wait until all the Optimum lawsuits get into federal court. The Ledger will have a field day if they hear about a “workplace romance” happening with the people investigating the case, since those assholes don’t know the difference between two equals who work together becoming romantically involved and the _criminality_ of what happened at Optimum.”

“They know the difference. They pretend not to, because it makes for better headlines, more advertising money. Rafa, look, I made this mistake with Tucker. The St. Fabiola’s case almost fell apart because of us, I won’t —”

“It’s all right.” He kissed the top of her head. “I wanted to make a move years ago, you know.”

“I didn’t. You’re good at hiding your thoughts. Very good.”

He went back to caressing her hair. “You empathize with Mariel,” he said, half to himself.

“Not that I — I really did almost kill her once, in self-defense, I — had to get a lawyer for myself and —”

She felt his chest rise and fall, another heavy sigh in his throat as he hugged her tightly to him. 

“About a week after she died, this is more than 17 years ago now, I went to your bar in Brooklyn. I was looking for you.”

“You were —”

“Rafa.” She lifted her head. Stretching one arm out towards the coffee table, she picked up her son’s stuffed elephant. “There are elephants in the room other than Eddie that need to be confronted.”

“All right,” he said, that sweet, lopsided grin taking over his face once more as he took the stuffed elephant from her and pitched him across the living room, “let’s go in the bedroom and make that mistrial happen.”

She playfully smacked his arm. “Optimum,” she reminded him. “A few more months.”

“When the federal cases are up.”

“I was stupid,” she admitted. “I —”

“You could never be stupid.”

“I was. Seventeen years ago, my heart was broken, I didn’t know how to grieve, I didn’t want to grieve at all, and I remembered you there the year before, a conversation I’d eavesdropped on, and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He kissed her lips softly, almost chastely. “When — who was it, Steven Harris? — introduced us, I didn’t want to remember that time in my life, I didn’t want to remember 1999. That good enough for you?”

“You never brought it up.”

“They made me responsible for pulling the plug on the man who beat my mother. A year later the person I thought was the great love of my life left me because I couldn’t accept that his asshole family didn’t want me around, and, Liv, I don’t like to talk about this, I’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

“Okay.” The word fell from her lips like a promise as she rubbed his temple with her thumb. She kissed each cheek near the pockets under his eyes. “I went to that bar three times looking for you.”

“That was you? The bartender told me to be careful, there was a “lady detective” coming around who desperately wanted to get into my pants.”

“Good thing I walked out the third time, when I actually saw you there.”

“When was that?”

“Um.” She pursed her lips and sat up straight. “Later.”

Barba leaned in towards her, his lips dangerously close to her jawline. “When?”

“2011.”

“And you never said anything?”

“I was inappropriate. You never said anything about 1999.”

“Do you mind me asking whatever happened with the Mira Margolis case? I remember hearing about it, about the aftermath, from my colleagues with homicide in Brooklyn. If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.”

“No, it’s fine. I have not heard from Detective Walker, or from Mira’s husband, in almost seven years.”

“I was never on that case. A colleague was, though, and she told me — must have been a few months before I put in for a transfer — that the son was exonerated, almost twelve years after the fact, after he’d already served his full prison sentence.”

“I told Walker over and over and over again that Paulie had been set up. I don’t know what the detectives did with what I told them. From my point of view, they must have done nothing.”

“You never thought the son did it,” Barba observed.

“I knew him when he was a toddler. He called me Aunt Liv. Maybe my perception of the case is colored by that, but he had two alibi witnesses who the detectives never interviewed. But it’s too late now.”

“Tell me about the case,” Barba said. “I can go home and stew in my guilt over what I did in court today, I can act on impulse and destroy a very important case, or —”

“We can talk about a cold case until all our troubles are forgotten.”

He kissed her jawline. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “I never want to make you sad. Never.”

“I remember you told me all those years ago that you didn’t want to drag me into your shit.”

“I didn’t. You seemed too kind, too beautiful, too —”

“No need to lay it on so thick. You’re kind and beautiful yourself.”

“Me? The asshole ADA who just got a teenager who lived in abject terror of her mother to —”

“Rafa.” She grasped his hand, intertwining her fingers with his. “Here’s what I knew. Here’s what was never in the papers, what I’ve never told to anyone except for the detectives on the case: Mira kidnapped Paul when she was a 19-year-old law student in Minnesota, on track to be the youngest-ever JD to graduate from her school, when she gave up everything to save this little boy from her ex-boyfriend, his new wife, and their idiot families. He’s not her biological son, and she never had any legal rights to him.”

“My God,” Barba couldn’t help saying.

“She came to New York, moved in with her sister who worked on Wall Street, and started at the police academy, where she hid in plain sight. She married Neil a few years in because she thought she needed to have a “nuclear family” so no one would ask too many questions about Paulie. Neil never knew the truth. The only people who knew were me and her sister.”

“Did they look at the husband? The ex-boyfriend?”

“I don’t know who the ex-boyfriend was. Neither did her sister. Mira kept the specifics very, very close to her chest. It must have been to protect Paul. As for Neil, he was kind of a jerk, didn’t mean to be, but he never understood why she wanted to be a lieutenant, why she wanted to head up a whole precinct. There were so many possible angles on her murder. The kidnapping never came out, and I’m glad it didn’t, but why Walker never looked at that as a motive for what Paul, well, didn’t do, I’ll never understand.”

“Someday,” Barba said, “when you retire and I’m fed up with McCoy, we’ll start a consulting agency and solve all the cold cases.”

That brought a smile to her face, a big one.

—

“You know what? Screw you, Barba,” Benson said, pressing an open, gloved hand to his back, very nearly shoving him. 

She’d stood there on the street for maybe thirty seconds, hot tears freezing on her eyelashes, disappointment boiling the fragments of her too-many-times broken heart, until she decided, furious, that she would not be _left_ again, she would not be _left_ for someone else’s good, she would not be _left_ so that another character in her story could resignedly start their life over, pursue something that was supposedly better, while she stayed where she was.

Barba turned around, red-eyed, mouth open, stunned.

“After what we talked about during the McLaughlin case, after six years, after all that’s been between us, you can’t kiss me on the forehead and disappear from my life as if you were never in it.” She heard the raspiness in her own voice. “You, the one I’ve confided in, the one who _knows_ how I feel about people I love disappearing from my life overnight, you should know better.”

Barba’s face crumpled and he started to cry, right there on the street, right there outside the subway station. She wanted to comfort him, but willed herself not to be so stupid as to comfort what seemed like the millionth person to abandon her for greener pastures.

“Go,” she said. “Go wherever you’re “moving on” to. I understand if you need to move on from the DAs office — McCoy did not do right by you — but to move on from _me_ , and from Noah —“

He wanted to embrace her but she wouldn’t let him.

“No,” she said. “Just go. You’re to call me next week, you hear me?”

He nodded. 

“You’re to call me, wherever you are, I don’t care, but you are not to disappear from my life.”

“I thought it would be best for you if I —” he started to say, but his silent sobs wouldn’t let him finish, so he turned towards the subway entrance instead.

_Lots of shit going on that I wouldn’t want to drag you into_ , she remembered him telling her more than 18 years ago. _You seem like a very sweet, very dedicated person who should not be dragged into my shit._

—

_In Miami, staying with a friend until this mess blows over,_ he texted her exactly one week later. _Making some calls to law firms._

She didn’t respond. At two o’clock in the morning, she heard her phone chime.

_I love you._

She flopped her head back down on the pillow.

2:30 AM: _I’m sorry I put you in a position where you had to fix the worst mistake I’ve ever made, one that impacted a lot of lives._

2:35 AM: _When you’re ready, call me._

She didn’t.


	3. Harbors

“Fan fiction?” 

Rafael Barba sipped his scotch, pursed his lips, and swallowed hard. He was sitting on the floor of Santiago Garcia’s apartment in Miami. Santiago, Eddie’s younger cousin, who he’d assisted with law school applications and guided through a number of major life changes 15 years ago, was now a defense attorney, a very successful defense attorney, in fact. Barba’s back was to the sofa, legs out in front of him, glass in hand. For the first time in weeks, he wasn’t sad.

“Fan fiction,” Santiago echoed. “The case started with —”

“Wait wait wait,” Santiago’s friend and colleague Laura Perez interrupted, waving a finger in his direction as she swallowed the last of her Cabernet.

Barba tried to ignore the choice of wine.

Laura was staying in the apartment too, sleeping in Santiago’s guest room while her four-bedroom house remained empty because of a viciously contested divorce that she didn’t like to talk about. With Barba sleeping on the sofabed, Santiago’s apartment had become a temporary Home for Sad Attorneys.

“You have to tell the story so the fan fiction part comes in last,” Laura insisted. “It doesn’t pack a punch unless you tell the story and then say, _all this horrible shit happened, blablabla, because of fan fiction_.”

“Florida,” Rita Calhoun chimed in, reaching for the bottle across the coffee table.

Matthew Kaplan, the other guest in Santiago’s apartment that night, flashed Rita his middle finger. Rita laughed, nodding with approval.

Rita and Matt had both been in Barba’s Harvard Law cohort. Matt had returned to his hometown of Miami after Harvard, where he’d lived and worked ever since. Rita was allegedly in Miami on vacation. Barba understood that she’d probably come down for moral support, but, unsure of where his morality lay these days, he didn’t know how deserving of that moral support, of that degree of friendship, he was.

He’d done what Liv had asked: a week after he arrived, he texted her to let her know where he was. She didn’t answer. At two o’clock in the morning, the degree to which he’d broken her heart finally cut through the selfishness that had encrusted his soul after his trial. _I love you_ , he’d texted. He sent one more message, and then tried to call the next morning. A week had gone by and still, nothing.

“You tell it, then, you tell it,” Santiago said.

“Okay. For a minute, forget we said anything about fan fiction,” Laura said, patting Barba’s leg.

Rita shot Laura a death glare.

“So —“

“He’s too old for you,” Rita interrupted.

Matt cleared his throat. “Rita.”

“What? It’s true.”

“Nothing is happening, which is irrelevant, because I’m 33, not 17,” Laura said, flashing a sarcastic grin in Rita’s direction.

“Rafael’s 48 and creaky.”

“Laura, please ignore Rita and continue your story,” Barba said.

“I don’t appreciate when women in their 40s talk to all women younger than them as if they’re all uniformly 17 years old. I’m an associate at one of the top firms in this city, and I can hold my own, thank you, Ms. Calhoun.”

“All right, all right, sustained,” Rita said, raising her glass in Laura’s direction. 

“I apologize for Rita,” Matt said. “She sees things that aren’t there because she’s a hardcore Barba-Benson shipper.”

Barba almost choked on his scotch.

“Nice use of fan fiction terminology,” Laura said. “We had a paralegal make a glossary for everyone on the case, because —”

“Can we get back to the story, please?” Santiago begged.

“Yes,” Barba said, “get back to the story.”

“Thank you.” Laura slid over a few inches, putting some distance between herself and Barba to avoid incurring any more of Rita’s wrath. “This guy, this teacher, comes to us because his 25-year-old daughter’s in a lot of trouble. Attorney General’s filing 16 counts of fraud against her, and that’s only for the sake of protecting her from worse charges that might come down if the feds take over the case. She’d been posing online as a 45-year-old attorney and dispensing legal advice. She collected some money, but it’s all incidental: she told her online friends that one of her “kids” had a rare disease that Taylor Swift sang about once, and somebody started a GoFundMe for the fake kid. This young woman, we’ll call her Polly for the sake of privacy, went ahead and donated the funds to a real cancer research foundation.”

“The fraud charges,” Santiago said, “were because she had a website for a fake legal firm where she — or her character, her online persona — dispensed legal advice, usually very bad legal advice.”

“To the point that she didn’t know that pleading no contest is effectively the same as a guilty plea.”

“Holy shit,” Rita said, leaning forward, now very much into this story.

“So she’s giving bad legal advice, and she’s violating all kinds of privacy statutes,” Laura said, taking the wine bottle from Rita and pouring the last of it into her glass. “And what’s amazing, what’s got us banging our heads against our desks at the office, is that nobody had any clue she was a fraud.”

“Like they said back in the 90s, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” Matt offered.

“Please,” Santiago called from the kitchen, where he’d gone to dig up another bottle of wine, “our client had fuzzy ears and a wagging tail. The people she gave legal advice to chose not to see that.”

“She’s still your client?” Rita asked. “This is a good enough story to risk ethical violations over?”

“Yes,” Santiago and Laura said at the same time.

“Besides,” Santiago added, “she’s been missing for six months. State police are investigating, but they’ve turned up nothing, and we honestly think —”

“But even so,” Rita said, “say she’s dead, that’s still Swidler, et cetera.”

“I don’t think she’s dead,” Santiago said. “She didn’t do anything to make anyone _that_ mad. I’m guessing the father used whatever extra money he had lying around to get her out of the country. And whatever we say is not going beyond this room anyway. Anybody here after a judicial appointment?”

“Nope,” Barba said, raising his glass.

He’d put his name on the list for New York State judicial appointments two years ago, just after he’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the Abreu matter. At the time, he was assured he’d be appointed to a bench within five years. Now, he was sure, his name had been scrubbed from that list. 

“Continue,” he told Laura when he saw the sudden sympathy spring up in Rita’s and Matt’s eyes.

“So, a whole mess of privacy violations, because the people who communicated with her thought there was a defense attorney on the other end. A defense attorney who’d had her first eight children, a set of quadruplets and two sets of twins, before she was 20. This lawyer started as a character Polly made up for an online forum when she was eleven years old.

“She had 24 children and was pregnant with her 25th when she and her husband were killed in the California wildfires. Her followers wanted to send money to the family, but when they couldn’t find an obituary or any news reports, that’s when the scam started to unravel.”

“And now why did your firm have to spend all that time researching fan fiction?” Barba said. “Forgive me, the time and budget available to defense attorneys never ceases to amaze me.”

“When she made up the character, it was originally for a private online forum. She later posted as her on a bunch of pregnancy sites. Turns out half the people on pregnancy and childbirth sites are never-been-pregnant teenagers pretending to be pregnant women in their 30s with lots of drama in their pretend lives. That alone was a revelation.”

Barba found himself smiling for the first time in weeks. Laura had been reserved, more quiet than her personality suggested during the two weeks he’d known her — the circumstances of her divorce, which he hadn’t pried into, had apparently been very rough — but now, as she told the story, she was animated, excited, closer to her usual self, or the self she’d once been, Barba guessed.

Rita’s death glare was fixed on him this time. He ignored it.

“When Polly was 18,” Laura continued, “she started writing fan fiction for CSI — you know, that procedural that was on for 500 years — and her reviews were mostly negative at first, so she told everyone, “look, I’m a lawyer with 20 kids, I know what I’m doing,” and she made friends in the fanfic community, and within a few months, she was one of the most popular writers on the site.”

Santiago laughed. “Except for the three or four people who suspected that a 45-year-old lawyer with 24 kids and 7 grandkids who had at least one rare medical condition a year might not be real.”

“So the story here, the way you’ve got to tell it,” Laura explained, waving her hands animatedly, “is that a 25-year-old dispensed bad legal advice, violated dozens of people’s privacy, _mierda muy seria_ , all for the sake of people accepting her CSI fan fiction.”

The room full of attorneys (“what’s the collective noun for a group of attorneys?” Rita had wondered at one point, following her own question with a “don’t answer that”) laughed and chatted and drank for another hour. After 11, Rita and Matt got ready to leave, and Rita hugged Barba and muttered “don’t do anything stupid” into his ear.

“I have already committed enough stupidity to last a lifetime,” he assured her.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. And you call me, not Dworkin, when you’re ready to sue Jack McCoy for mental anguish for his overzealous prosecution of you.”

“New York State statutes don’t leave much room for _mental anguish_.”

“You let me take care of it. When you’re ready. And when you’re ready, call me so I can set up an interview for you with one of our senior partners.”

After Rita and Matt left, Santiago and his houseguests cleaned up the mess they’d made on the coffee table. Santiago went to bed and Barba took a shower to try to ease the chill that had crept into his bones despite the temperate weather. As he was pulling on pajama pants, he heard a _crack_ in the kitchen.

He threw on a white undershirt and hurried into the kitchen to find Laura at the table, her face pressed into both of her hands, her forehead and cheeks a deep red. “Hey,” he said, gently approaching her, laying an open hand on her shoulder, ready to retract it if she shuddered for even a moment at his touch, “anything I can do to help?”

She shook her head _no_ from beneath her hands. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” 

“No,” she said, standing, embracing Barba and wiping a tear-stained cheek on his undershirt, “I’ve been talking about it, in more and more detail, more detail than any judge in Florida or New York or anywhere along I-95 would require, for three years now, and I’ve had a headache for at least 900 days, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Then don’t.”

She looked up at him. “I broke my phone, Rafi,” she said, a half-laugh, half-sob escaping from her throat. “My former mother-in-law called for the third time today, and it’s almost midnight, and I threw the phone across the room and —”

“You’re lucky I’m an expert mobile phone repairman. Now if you’ll please like and share my fanfiction about mobile phone repair …”

She started to laugh at his half-assed attempt at a joke and, thinking only to comfort her, he kissed the top of her forehead. When he recalled the significance of that particular gesture, he shivered, nauseated by the thought that he and his fellow resident of the Home for Abogados Tristes had been flirting for at least a week to combat their misery. But maybe, maybe that wasn’t so bad.

“Where’d the phone go?” he asked.

“No lo sé,” she said with a shrug.

“Y no te importa?”

“No.” She lifted her face and kissed his neck. He didn’t mind her keeping her lips there, touching his skin with her tongue, a little enjoyment now that all his other hopes — Olivia, the bench, a storied, well-respected prosecutorial career — had been flushed down the toilet. Laura still had a future, though, regardless of what was happening with her ex-husband, and why, _why_ was he flushing from head to toe?

“Rafi,” she said, kissing his lips, “you’re not looking for anything, right?”

“Your phone?” he suggested, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re cute, Rafi.”

She knew him as Rafi because Santiago, through Eddie, knew him as Rafi, but still, the name made him feel young again — young as in, that brief period between ages 23 and 28 when the troubles of his youth had neither weighed down on nor caught up with him — and got him going a little, had his lips searching for spots along Laura’s jawline and collarbone that would let her briefly forget her own troubles.

With her hands planted firmly on his ass, she pulled him towards her. “Bedroom,” she whispered.

“Bedroom,” he agreed.

He had to admit to himself that he was enjoying Laura’s eagerness, the way she ground herself down on his hand, pulled him towards her, slyly told him how big various body parts were. “You flatter an old man,” he joked, when her thumbs were in the waistband of his boxers, and he was mouthing at her breasts as he helped pull her tank top over her head.

He caught his breath and asked her if she was all right.

“Yes,” she hissed. “Please, Rafi, please, I need to forget —”

That uncomfortable flush hit him again — panic? — Followed by a wave of nausea so strong that he had to leap up and run to the bathroom. 

When he returned to the bedroom, Laura was standing, arms folded, shirt back on, face folded in worry.

Barba was shivering.

“I haven’t believed in divine punishment since confirmation class,” Laura said, “but I think you’ve got the flu.”

—

By morning, he had a fever of 103 and a breathless cough, so Santiago dragged him to a doctor, who prescribed Tamiflu in the hopes of at least cutting a week to ten days of misery in half. He spent the next two days under the covers on the sofabed while Santiago and Laura pestered him and made lawyerly arguments about eating and drinking. On the third day, he was able to get out of bed and shuffle into the kitchen. He went right for the coffeemaker.

“Rafi,” Laura said, and he jumped when he realized she’d been sitting behind him, working on her laptop at the kitchen table. “Coffee? It’s nine o’clock. At night.”

“Caffeine withdrawal headache,” he said.

“Not that it’s any of my business, but don’t you still have to watch for dehydration?”

He opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of water from the filter pitcher before starting a pot of coffee. “Would you and Santiago also like to know how many times I peed today?”

“I was going to ask what color it was,” Laura said, a smirk on her lips, her eyes still not looking away from her laptop.

“Are you all right?” he asked, sitting at the table while he waited for the coffee to brew. 

She pinched her nose and stuck out her tongue. “Take a shower,” she said. “You smell like VapoRub and sadness.”

“I meant, do you have any flu symptoms?”

“No,” she assured him. “I must have been lucky. Got my phone fixed, by the way.” She patted the smartphone next to her laptop.

“You need anything, you let me know,” he said, his voice still hoarse from coughing. “Anything besides —”

“That was probably a bad idea, as evidenced by your immediately throwing up and coming down with the flu.”

“I was having fun beforehand,” he promised, and a smile spread across her face.

“Still a bad idea.” She rubbed her temples. “900-day headache. You have enough headaches of your own. You don’t need mine, too.”

His heart broke for Laura, a little for himself too. 

She pressed a hand to her own shoulder and massaged her neck. “May I?” he asked, and she nodded.

He washed his hands, glancing over at the coffeepot, then stood behind Laura, pressing his thumbs into the joints that connected her neck and shoulders, gently at first, then adding a little more pressure. She let out an “ahh.” He felt her muscles relax beneath his touch.

“Tell me more about fan fiction,” he said when an accidental glance at her computer screen revealed not work, but a section of a divorce agreement. 

She closed the laptop. Although the coffee was ready, Barba continued to massage her shoulders and the back of her head. “It was a bizarre case,” she said. “Out of our hands now, but I still worry about Amy.”

“Polly,” he corrected.

“We’ll call this a consult. No ethical breach. Go get your coffee.”

He pressed into one more knot in her shoulder, and then poured himself a cup of coffee from the counter. “Coffee?” he asked.

“It’s nine o’clock. It’ll keep me up all night.”

“Okay.” He took his cup and sat with her. “You worry about your client who defrauded dozens of people? Probably makes you a good defense attorney.”

“I had a psychologist we use as an expert witness talk to her, and she couldn’t help us out. She said there’s no evidence of psychopathy or sociopathy, even though it really seems that way to a layperson, and her — they call it “confabulation” — wasn’t entirely for attention, it was so she could make up stories online. It was tough to make a case that she wasn’t just a jerk who didn’t know when to stop.”

“No family background that could have suggested psych issues, at least to a jury?”

“There was something we were going to try, but then Amy disappeared.”

“Tell me. I’m studying up on being a defense attorney.”

“You? You’ve got the heart of a prosecutor.”

“Is that an insult?” he said, laughing through a cough.

“No. I just can’t picture you as a defense attorney. I can’t see you on our side. Have you ever thought about the bench?”

“My abuelita did. She called me “el juez.””

“Aww, that’s sweet.”

“That’s all, well, that’s all over and done with now.”

“You overstepped ethical boundaries for sure,” she said, “but if I were your attorney, if I were Rita, I’d get the baby’s mother on the stand and —”

“Laura. There are things you don’t want to talk about, and there are things I don’t want to talk about.”

“Sorry.” She patted his hand. “I understand.”

“There are civil suits filed against me, anyway. Rita and I will disagree on this, but that family doesn’t deserve to be put through any more misery.”

“Neither do you.”

“Thank you.” He choked back a few unintended tears and sipped his coffee. “And you, too. No more misery. I mean it.”

“So, Amy,” she said, trying to brighten her voice, presumably for his sake, “raised by a single mother in Miami Gardens, product of a secret extramarital affair. Mother dies of breast cancer when Amy’s only 13, father comes down here to be her guardian even though they’ve only met once or twice before. But Dad, he’s a moron. He cares about her, retained the best firm in town, obviously, but he’s a moron. On top of all that, her half-brother was released from prison around the same time her father came here. He was around 30 and came to live with them too. He served five years for killing his mother, on a plea bargain, and wound up being cleared after the fact. So there’s something to be said for her family background.”

Barba had suddenly stopped drinking his coffee.

“What?” Laura prompted.

“Amy’s father came down here from New York, didn’t he?”

“Yes, why? Don’t tell me —”

“Not directly. Was Amy’s father married to Lieutenant Mira Margolis?”

Laura flipped her laptop back open and, for a good two minutes, searched frantically through her files. “Yes,” she said, her mouth hanging open. “The half-brother was convicted of murdering his mother, Lieutenant Mira Margolis. Conviction was overturned right around the time that Mira’s husband moved to Miami.”

Barba knew a lot about Amy’s father and Amy’s half-brother (who was unrelated to her biologically, though Amy and her father likely had no idea); he knew much more than Laura and Santiago, Amy’s own defense attorneys.

He knew what Liv had told him. 

He knew that until Liv had told Detective Cal Walker about Mira’s son Paul and her pre-NYPD life, no one other than Liv and Mira’s sister knew the truth. 

“Rafi?” Laura asked.

To tell Laura what he knew might mean betraying Liv’s confidence.

He’d done enough of that already.

“Confidentiality, I get it,” Laura said.

“It’s a confidence shared with me by — by —”

“Olivia.” 

“Yes.”

“It’s okay, Rafi. The other night, we were looking for an escape, both of us from very different situations. You thought it was over between you and one of those great, epic, destiny-crushing loves.”

“You describe it so dramatically.”

“I had a love like that once,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I was young and stupid and trusting. His murder was the reason I became a defense attorney.”

To Barba, it seemed strange that the murder of someone’s young love would inspire them to become a defense attorney, not a prosecutor, but he knew better than to say anything more than “I’m sorry.”

“Seeing this now, this connection between the Margolis case and mine” — she squinted again at her screen, an expression of disbelief plastered on her face — “I told you, I probably haven’t believed in signs from heaven since confirmation class, but this is enough to win me over to Rita’s side, to turn me into a — ah — Barba and Benson shipper.”

Barba sipped his coffee, trying to hide his embarrassment behind the cup.

“You need a good ship name.”

“Laura, please, that “ship” may have sailed. I punched a big hole in it. Hundió toda la maldita cosa. If it wasn’t for this stupid flu, I —“

“We’d have been together a night, a few nights, it would have been great, but neither of us was looking for more than a couple rounds of great sex anyway.”

“You deserve more.”

“No,” she said plainly, “at this point in my life, I just want really good sex.”

“I mean, look —” he started to say, he started to _offer_ , but he thought of Liv, her smile, the smile he wanted to restore to her face, the holes in her heart, in their _ship_ , that he wanted so much to mend. Laura was right; they were after very different things. 

She’d had a great love, she’d experienced loss, and grief, and very likely emotional abuse (all those years as a prosecutor, he recognized the signs) and was after great sex for a night or two. He’d had good sex, but his only great requited love had crumbled many years ago, and the unrequited one — well, that was still sinking in the harbor, but maybe hadn’t drifted out of his reach just yet.

“Olivi-a-ra,” Laura was saying, testing out the rhythms of different ship names. “Rafi-li — RAFIOLI, that’s it! Your ship name is Rafioli!”

Barba laughed. “You sure I didn’t get you sick?”

“Get your ass back to New York.”

“When I feel better, I’ll take a week to figure out what I’m going to do about my job, the civil suits, my mother —”

“And Olivia.”

“And Olivia.”

Laura squeezed his hand. “Call Rita,” she said. “Tell her I’m on Team Rafioli now.”


	4. Staten Island Ferry

In late February, Daniel Zadon, a 39-year-old bookkeeper at a private school in Manhattan, was ROR’ed on charges of sexual assault of a minor. Daniel never should have been working at a school in the first place: there was a 25-year history of similar charges against him in Florida and New York. Stone, who was a very good homicide prosecutor, was unable to get bail, and could not convince the judge to require Daniel to surrender his passport. The next day, Daniel disappeared. NYPD, and later the feds, were unable to locate him. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Benson had said when Stone approached her at Forlini’s a few nights later. _Go the fuck back to Chicago and take Jack McCoy with you_ , was what she held back.

Carisi was looking into Daniel’s uncle Will, a corporate lawyer who had, according to several acquaintances, taken Daniel in after his mother died, when he was only ten years old. Will Zadon, according to Carisi, was more fiercely loyal to Daniel than he was to any of his five children, presumably because of promises that Will had made to his sister a long time ago. 

Twelve years ago, Will’s daughter Dara, backed by her brother Geoff, alleged that Daniel had molested her throughout her childhood. 

“Did Will know anything about it while it was going on?” Benson asked Carisi.

“Absolutely. Dara and her brother said that when they told Will about it, he said Daniel had emotional problems on account of his early family life, and had to be protected from the law. Dara wasn’t even allowed to see a psychotherapist.”

Will’s three daughters learned that they were less worthy of protection than his beloved Daniel, and Daniel continued to live with the family.

Dara and Geoff Zadon’s efforts amounted to nothing. The cops and lawyers in Florida and points north told them that the statute of limitations was up. A month later, Will moved himself, his wife, their two minor children, and Daniel from Miami to New York City. 

All the charges and complaints against Daniel in Florida were dropped or withdrawn, and sealed.

“He never should have been working at a school,” an agitated Carisi told Benson. “But the background checks would have turned up nothing, thanks to the uncle and his connections. The principle said he had reliable references, too, a glowing letter of recommendation.”

The kicker: three months after the rest of the Zadons moved to New York, 23-year-old Geoff was shot in an alley behind a Tallahassee bar. He’d gone out for a smoke and was killed when a mugging went wrong, according to the investigating detectives. “Bullshit,” Carisi said when he read about the case.

One detective in Tallahassee, however, was convinced that Will had ordered a hit on Geoff, but she could never prove her theory, especially after the perp was arrested and confessed to killing Geoff in the process of robbing him.

“Why would anyone want to rob a law student?” Carisi asked. “Twelve years ago — 2006 — a full-time law student wouldn’t have been carrying cash on him.”

Benson had never seen Carisi so frustrated by a case. “It’s out of our hands now,” she said, “unless the feds find Daniel.”

“Yeah, right. Our buddy Stone couldn’t even get the judge to confiscate Daniel’s passport. Where do you think he went, Massapequa?”

“I know we’ve all had a rough time lately —”

“McCoy couldn’t have given us an experienced special victims prosecutor who gets that in special victims cases, families are sometimes completely off on where there priorities are supposed to be? I saw this coming a mile away.”

“We are all —”

“The thing with Barba, though, that I never saw coming.” He paused to look down at Benson, who was signing papers spread across her desk, her left hand shut tight, absentmindedly slamming into the hard surface. “Sorry, Lieutenant, look at me, pouring salt on an open wound.”

“It’s all right.” She stood from behind her desk and walked over to the window, gazing into the empty interrogation room. “He’s in Miami.”

“Who, Zadon?”

“Barba.”

“You heard from him?”

“He’s staying with friends there until he pulls it together.”

“Good, good — did you —” He bit his lower lip. “None of my business.”

“He texted me and I didn’t answer.”

“I mean, look, Barba helped me through a lot after Dodds died, when I blamed myself for not going on that call.”

“Carisi,” she said, a hint of sympathy creeping into her voice, “the outcome might not have been different.”

“I had lots of experience with DV unlawful imprisonment back on Staten Island, but anyway, look, I can’t say what came over him, what made him —”

“Let’s not worry about Barba. Let’s worry about McCoy finding us a new prosecutor.”

“Agreed,” Carisi said. 

“What else do you have for me on the Zadon family?”

“Something that might help the case. There’s one person who knows more about what happened to Geoff that night at the bar. His girlfriend at the time was also a law student at FSU. She gave a statement to PD down there, but all that’s sealed.”

“Are we stepping on Florida PD’s toes if we interview her?”

“Maybe, maybe not. Problem is, there’s a nondisclosure clause in her divorce agreement, where she’s not allowed to talk about Geoff’s murder.”

“She and Geoff were married?”

“No. A year after she graduated law school, she married Geoff’s twin brother Joseph.”

“That’s … incredibly strange, but to each her own. Are you saying that Joseph Zadon didn’t want his wife talking about his twin brother’s murder?”

“Suspicious, right? There’s a clause in Laura and Joseph’s divorce agreement that says she’s not allowed to talk to the press, law enforcement, or any attorneys about the Zadon family.”

“Hey, Carisi,” Benson said, leaning back in her chair, “how do you know what’s in a private divorce agreement?”

“Fordham. I’ve got people.”

“Tread lightly,” she said. “So lightly you don’t leave footprints.”

With a dopey smile, Carisi tiptoed out of Benson’s office.

—

Two weeks later, when a bitter winter chill had still not left New York City even as spring approached, Carisi stood outside the 16th Precinct station, studying a row of pastries through a coffee cart window, when his mobile phone started to buzz in his pocket. He answered the phone and, when he turned around, found himself facing Benson, who came down to the cart most mornings for something better than the muddy coffee always on in the squadroom.

“What’s up?” she asked when Carisi shoved his phone back in his pocket.

“Will Zadon’s body was found near a dumpster by the Staten Island Ferry this morning.”

“Revenge killing?”

“Could be one of Daniel’s victims, or their parents, out for revenge. Can I take Rollins with me?”

“She and Fin are headed to a meeting with Stone. I’ll tag along. Let me run back upstairs and get my stuff.”

When they arrived at the ferry terminal, Benson was startled to see traffic cordoned off in a six-block arc around the southern tip of Manhattan, with FBI and Homeland Security spread out as far as Battery Park. “What’s your business here?” one of the Homeland Security officers asked Benson and Carisi.

“Lieutenant Olivia Benson, Special Victims Unit. My squad was investigating Daniel Zadon and, since Daniel’s disappearance, his uncle.”

“Who?”

“This is an NYPD case.”

“Right, right, you’re talking about the body from this morning. We had to clear NYPD out of here fifteen minutes ago. We’re trying to leave your crime scene undisturbed, but we’ve got bigger problems. You heard of the guy who’s been stealing New Jersey commuter ferries since 1975? He just stole the Staten Island Ferry.”

“But our crime scene —” Benson started to say.

“Like I said, ma’am, we’ll try our best to preserve it.”

Carisi squinted into the distance. “Are there passengers on the ferry?”

“No. He only steals ‘em empty. Historically returns them a couple days later, but this is a five-story, 2800-ton ferry that he’s already gotten out to the Atlantic Ocean. You guys aren’t getting to your crime scene before sunset.”

“Shit,” Carisi said.

“Come on,” Benson offered, “I’ll buy you a donut while I share this news with Captain Dodds.”

The Homeland Security officer caught up with them just as they started to walk away. “Hey, uh, Lieutenant, my guys found another body.”

“I’m never eating breakfast,” Carisi complained.

The officer waved them through. “Floater,” he told them, turning his head from the body. “You recognize her? Any relation to your case?”

“No,” Benson said, “but we need to get CSU and the ME down here right now.”

“We can’t allow that until —”

“With the body drying here on the dock, the ME’s not going to be able to determine a time of death. Carisi, call Lieutenant Bernard, he handles homicides in this precinct.”

Thanks to the floater, whatever tragic end she may have met, Benson and Carisi were able to examine their crime scene. 

“You know,” Carisi said, “this might be a revenge killing, but not for what we thought. See how he’s behind the dumpster? I’ll bet CSU finds he was killed somewhere else and left here. When Will’s son Geoff was killed behind that bar in Tallahassee, people came running after they heard the gunshot, and they found him behind a dumpster.”

—

In the afternoon, Carisi, who’d finally acquired a breakfast pastry for himself, interviewed Will’s wife Cordelia, who furiously defended both Will and Daniel. “You bring me down here like this, a widow, I have to plan my husband’s funeral and you have me at a police station. You have no soul.”

“What about your son Joseph?” Carisi asked. “You know where he is?”

“In Miami,” she said sharply. “How dare you.”

“How did Joseph feel about Will back when Geoff was murdered?”

“How dare you,” she repeated. “Joseph grieved for his brother, he was depressed and miserable after Geoff was killed — by a mugger, mind you, there’s a man in jail who confessed to everything in front of a judge — but what got to him even more was when the police questioned Will, as if Will would ever do anything like that to his own kids. He was the most protective father you’ll ever meet.”

“And your three daughters?”

“Dara’s in Florida. Molly lives with me, she was with me all night, and Hallie lives in Jersey. My kids had nothing to do with Will’s murder.”

“Even Dara, who accused —”

“I’m calling my lawyer. There are court orders that say that you do not get to ask about those “accusations,” which had to do with Geoff getting in too deep with people in law school who put funny ideas in his head. You do not get to ask about the lies that he and Dara tried to tell.”

“Mrs. Zadon —”

“Enough,” she interrupted. “Will knew every judge in this county. I’ll have your badge, swear to God, if you violate any of the court orders.”

—

By six, the feds had taken over the Zadon case entirely. Two states and a missing perp who had probably left the United States altogether meant the case was out of Manhattan SVU’s hands.

Ordinarily, Benson would have fought the feds (and Dodds) on jurisdiction. Daniel was theirs to bring to justice. Benson wanted to see him convicted on behalf of his prior victims, too, the ones who had been swept under the rug in Will’s overzealous defense of his nephew. But, between Noah’s kidnapping, Barba’s trial and departure, and being forced to make a life-or-death decision on behalf of a child waiting for a heart transplant, the first three months of the year had left her exhausted.

The other body, the floater, was identified a few days later as Amy Rankin, a 26-year-old with a history of Internet fraud and privacy violations. She’d been missing for six months, but, according to the ME, had been dead for less than a week when they’d found her. River current patterns told CSU that Amy might have jumped or been pushed off the Brooklyn Bridge. There were no signs of sexual assault. Amy was homicide’s case and had nothing to do with SVU. 

Until, that is, Laura Perez called SVU and asked for Benson.

She introduced herself as an associate on the team who’d represented Amy Rankin in her fraud case. “They sent you to me?” Benson asked. “My detective and I happened to be on the scene when Homeland Security found her. We were investigating a different case, and so were they. Have you spoken to Lieutenant Bernard?”

“Yes.”

“And he sent you to me?”

“I wanted to make sure NYPD had the correct timeline.”

“Our MEs are the best. I’m sure you’re fine, Ms. Perez.”

Benson sucked in a sharp breath when it dawned on her that the attorney she was speaking to shared a name with the girlfriend who had been with Geoff Zadon when he was killed in 2006. A Laura Perez — surely a common name, but still — had called 911 after finding Geoff shot dead in the alley. She’d supported Geoff and Dara in their accusations against Daniel. The same Laura Perez had married Geoff’s twin brother Joseph three years after the murder.

This Laura Perez was a defense attorney in Miami.

A quick internet search on Benson’s end turned up the name “Laura Perez Zadon” associated with the same firm. She’d dropped the “Zadon” almost three years ago.

Laura and Joseph’s divorce agreement allegedly kept her from discussing the Zadons. She wondered if Laura hadn’t recognized the fury that was in will, what he was capable of doing to protect Daniel, until it was too late, until she’d already married Joseph. 

Maybe, Benson wondered in the pit of her seasoned detective gut, Laura wanted to say something about the Zadons but her tongue was tied by their legal (and other) threats.

“Ms. Perez? You know I’m working the Zadon case, well, if it comes back from the feds that is, so —”

She heard a gasp, a serious gasp, on the other end.

“I — did — not —” Laura stammered.

A pause. A long one. Benson waited.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant, per the conditions of my divorce, I am not allowed to talk about that family, and I’ll ask you to please understand that any communication we had about them just now was unintended.” Her voice was flatter, more matter-of-fact now. “I was contacted by a federal investigator, I provided an alibi, and have been cleared as a suspect in the case that we are not discussing.”

So Laura really had been calling about her client.

Of all the bizarre —

“I spoke to Captain Walker with homicide in Brooklyn,” Laura continued, “and he suggested I update you on who Amy Rankin is, because she was the product of an extramarital affair. Her father was Neil Tiposi.”

“What?”

“Captain Walker suggested that since you had provided some critical evidence in the Margolis case —”

Benson stopped listening. What the hell did an SVU case involving a perp who’d fled the country, whose uncle and cousin had been murdered, and a floater who’d been negotiating fraud charges in Florida have to do with Mira? And Captain Walker would never “suggest” that someone talk to her about Mira, since he and his team had always seen Benson as an annoyance, a meddling friend distracting them from their task at hand, even after Paul’s conviction was overturned. Benson and Walker did not like each other. Laura was lying.

But, having heard the utter panic in Laura’s voice at the mention of the Zadons, Benson decided to leave it alone.

Laura filled Benson in on Amy’s story.

“I’ll tell Lieutenant Bernard downtown that he should seriously consider homicide here.”

“Thank you. And —”

“I’m not sure this will have any effect on the cold case, but I appreciate you bringing this to me.”

Laura Perez was at the nexus of three unsolved cases that concerned Benson: the Zadons, Amy Rankin, and Mira Margolis.

_Miami._

The thought struck her as she rode the subway home that evening: Laura had called to tell her about the Amy Rankin-Mira Margolis connection not because of Captain Walker, who’d have never openly disclosed the connection between Margolis and Benson, but —

Maybe —

Barba.

Her stomach soured a little.

Laura was a defense attorney in Miami, a large, impossibly sprawly city. It was very, very, very unlikely that she and Barba knew each other — wasn’t it?

It was also very unlikely that Laura had been both Amy Rankin’s defense counsel and Joseph Zadon’s ex-wife, but there they were.

Why had Barba betrayed something she’d told him in confidence — Mira’s darkest secret — to a 30-something defense attorney?

Well.

Benson clenched her teeth and tried to let the metallic squeaking of the subway drown out the possibilities that were crossing her mind. 

That wasn’t like Barba, though, to hook up with a younger woman defense attorney and spill someone else’s confidences, no matter how much they might help her case along.

Then again, flipping the switch on an infant with whom he had no familial connections wasn’t like Barba either.

Neither was leaving the way he did.

She remembered the young ADA she’d met in 1999, the trouble that refused to leave his eyes, the balled up hand in his pocket, the cigarette breath, the fear, the resignation that he’d been forced to carry too much on his shoulders.

If he’d found some comfort there in Miami, some escape, then good, she convinced herself. She imagined he’d find a job there too.

At night, she finally responded to his text from four weeks earlier.

_I love you too_ , she wrote. _I’m sorry I called you that night when I knew you were the worst person to call on a right-to-die case. I hope you can forgive me._

He texted back seconds later: _Not your fault. I shouldn’t have walked away._

_Dear Rafa, nothing changes except what has to._


	5. Reliable Disappointment

At the start of his fifth week in Miami, Barba Skyped in to an interview with the senior partners at Rita Calhoun’s firm. Three days later, they called to tell him that they were ready to hire him as an associate. He accepted the job offer and took his apartment in Manhattan off the market.

Laura, meanwhile, had received an offer on her and her ex-husband’s house, a property which had been very reluctantly conceded to her six months ago. They’d both be leaving Santiago’s apartment within a few days.

Barba caught Laura in the kitchen at 11 o’clock at night. She was working on her laptop and drinking his scotch. “Hey,” he said, “the owner of that scotch is trying to sleep.”

“I’ll buy you a bottle,” she promised. “A new-old bottle.”

“No te preocupes.”

“Rafael,” she said, wincing as she took another sip, “I made a mistake.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I called Olivia Benson.”

“Why?” he asked, a hint of anger creeping into his voice.

“They found Amy, my client, the fanfic fraud girl, in the water near the Staten Island Ferry. She either jumped or was pushed off the Brooklyn Bridge. Report said two of the first detectives on the scene were Olivia Benson and Dominick Carisi. I wanted to tip Lieutenant Benson off to the connection between Amy and Mira Margolis.”

“So now Liv thinks I betrayed her trust again. Great.”

“You didn’t. I know there’s more to the story you’re not telling me, and that’s fine, but I made up something about Captain Walker.”

“There’s no way Liv bought that.”

“I think she did.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

“Anyway, it turns out the reason they were at the Staten Island Ferry terminal in the first place was that they were investigating the murder of Will Zadon.”

“Who?”

“My father-in-law. Ex-father-in-law.”

Barba wrinkled his forehead and pressed his lips together, briefly closing his eyes. “How?” he finally asked.

“A very … unfortunate … connection.” For Laura, that warranted another sip of scotch. “I was trying to tip Olivia off to the link between Amy and Mira Margolis when I hear her typing on the other end and she says “you know I”m working on the Zadon case,” and I swear to God I didn’t, I am absolutely not allowed to talk about them, especially not to law enforcement. I hope Olivia will respect that.”

“Is anybody in danger?”

“Hypothetically —”

“Then brace yourself. She will not respect the conditions of your divorce.”

Laura’s eyes shifted nervously. “I can tell you, right?”

“It won’t leave this kitchen.”

“You won’t share my story with Olivia?”

“Unless you want me to. I swear on my abuelita’s grave.”

Laura closed her laptop. For her, that promise seemed to be enough. “Manhattan SVU was investigating my ex’s cousin, Daniel, who lived with the family,” she explained. She told Barba about her relationship with Geoff in law school, Geoff’s murder behind a bar near FSU, her foolish decision to marry Geoff’s twin brother Joseph three years later, her slow descent into the misery of a smart, stubborn woman caught in Will Zadon’s orbit, the miserable, constant headache that had not been remedied — that had been worsened, in fact — by the divorce.

“I don’t know the Florida statutes,” Barba said, “but you were a witness to a murder. In New York, I could get your whole divorce agreement thrown out the window.”

“You can’t,” she said. “Not even in New York. Will has judges up and down the East Coast who adore him. He shows them a completely different face than he shows his family. I know it’s hard to —”

“It’s not hard to believe at all. I worked special victims cases for twenty years, twenty-one, almost.”

Laura choked back tears. “Do you know you are the first person who’s let me tell my story without demanding more and more detail after every sentence?” She reached a hand across the table and Barba squeezed it. 

“You were a witness to a murder,” he repeated. “There must be a way.”

“I don’t know. Three years ago, I’d have agreed.”

“Between you and me, hypothetically, do you believe Will Zadon killed or ordered a hit on his son?”

“He definitely didn’t kill him. I’m sure he was spinning around in his office chair here while Geoff was murdered in Tallahassee. Was it a hit? Probably. Was it Will? I can’t say for sure.”

Barba didn’t push further. Laura, gazing into her glass, continued after a deep breath or two. “Will is a manipulative, controlling pendejo who makes sure everybody in the family and everybody who works for him knows not to cross him. He did little things to his kids to make sure they remembered who was in charge — minor insults, baiting them into arguments they couldn’t win, constantly criticizing their choices in clothing, education, spending habits, dating, until they couldn’t make decisions on their own anymore, all things that look insignificant individually but add up after years and years. But all of it — Will appearing to people outside the family like nothing more than an incredibly annoying man — hid the truth about Daniel, how Daniel was always his first priority, no matter what.”

“I’m sorry,” Barba said, shaking his head.

“Will’s M.O. was always emotional abuse as a means of protecting Daniel from credible accusations of sexual assault. He let a lot of things happen, especially to Dara and Molly. But I can’t say for sure whether he’d have had one of his sons killed.”

“I trust you,” Barba assured her. “You were in that family for years, so you know better than anyone.”

“Olivia Benson trained you well,” Laura said with a smile.

Barba rolled his eyes. “Twenty years in special victims has trained me well.”

“You’re really going to work for Rita Calhoun? You’re a family court judge, Rafi. That’s how I see you. So does Santiago. Probably Rita herself, too.”

“That possibility is off the table for me now.”

“But you were found not guilty.”

“I was sanctioned by the bar association for interfering with the case. Two years ago, I was sanctioned and suspended for a month because of a “loan” I gave to a drug-addicted witness. She died of an overdose, and I made sure her daughter didn’t have to drop out of school.”

“Speaks to your good heart.”

“A good heart doesn’t get you appointed to a bench in New York State. Interfering in cases as a prosecutor, that’ll —”

“El juez,” Laura said.

“My grandmother was 85.”

“But she was right.”

“So your divorce agreement,” he said, returning to their original topic of discussion, “that clause, it’s all about keeping secret what you know about Geoff?”

“About Geoff, and Daniel.”

“It’s asking you to keep quiet about your knowledge of a crime. Two crimes. That can’t possibly be binding.”

“One crime where someone’s already been convicted, another where the statute of limitations has long since passed. I hope Manhattan SVU gets Daniel on the newest charges, but your replacement apparently couldn’t get bail and Daniel’s gone, probably left the country.”

“Can I ask you what you think happened with Geoff?” Barba said, shuffling over to the dish rack to grab himself a tumbler. “I don’t want to press you —”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Laura said, pouring scotch into his glass. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to about this who doesn’t press me.”

He lifted his glass. “To Olivia Benson,” he joked.

“To the good ship Rafioli,” she added, clinking her glass with his. 

“You don’t think “Barson” works better?”

“Nope. Rafioli.”

Barba laughed. “Laura,” he said, “dime lo que crees que pasó con Geoff. Maybe I can help.”

“From my perspective — and I don’t know how good a witness I am, since I was his girlfriend, and I was there, and scared — that wasn’t a robbery gone wrong. It was a clean shot through — through —” She tapped her forehead with her middle and index fingers. “Hit job. Now, after seven years in criminal defense, I feel like I can say that was a hit job. The guy who confessed, he was lying for the sake of a deal for other crimes, other murders, they had him for.”

“So who was behind the hit, if not Will?” Barba asked, leaning in closer.

“I honestly don’t know. If it was Will, then why didn’t he also have Dara, the sister who was speaking out about Daniel, killed too? I can tell you this: there were two rumors going around among the Zadon siblings and Will’s wife’s family about who Daniel’s father was. The first rumor was Will himself.”

Barba cringed.

“Second, some mobster who’d raped Daniel’s mother. Given what I know now about Will’s personality — repugnante — that rings truest to me, that she was raped by one of his seedy clients way back when, and he continued to represent the client, kept his sister from reporting, and made her keep the pregnancy.”

“So maybe Daniel’s father, if that rumor is true, was behind the hit?”

“Even that, Dara always said she wasn’t sure if the mobster — if that rumor was true — ever knew the sister was pregnant.”

“It’s as if Will’s only loyalty is to Daniel.”

“That’s it exactly. Rafi, es tarde, estoy cansada, he terminado, I don’t know what else I can do.”

“Okay.” He stood, and she stood with him. “If you need anything, I still have friends in NYPD — well, not “friends” anymore per se, but — connections. Call me if you need anything at all.”

“Thank you. That means a lot.”

“You’ll take good care of yourself?”

“I have been for at least three years, right?”

“Please. Take good care of yourself.”

That night was the last time he’d see or hear from Laura Perez, formerly Laura Perez Zadon, for six months.

—

The night after Mariel McLaughlin confessed on the stand, when Benson was trying to get Barba to open up to her about what was troubling him, about those two times they’d met in 1999, she’d told him the bare bones of Mira Margolis’s story: when Mira was a 19-year-old law student in Minneapolis, slated at 21 to become her law school’s youngest-ever JD graduate, she abandoned a promising future to kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s four-month-old son. She changed the baby’s name to Paul and moved in with her sister in New York, eventually marrying Neil Tiposi and buying a house in Brooklyn where the second floor had a great view of the Verrazano Bridge. Meanwhile, hiding in plain sight, Mira had risen through the ranks of the NYPD.

The details Benson had left out: When Mira was 17, she started dating a 30-year-old lawyer. They’d broken up after a year because he’d expressed concern — that sort of screwed-expression pseudo-seriousness that was always really about something else — about Mira, who’d finished high school at only 14, attending law school. She’d never been sure, she told Benson, if his objections were related to gender roles or to the fact that his practice was rumored to be shady. Either way, Mira took his request as a warning sign and broke it off.

During their year-long relationship, Mira had met the lawyer’s younger sister, who worked as a receptionist at the firm. Later, Mira would find out that the sister was allegedly the person who coordinated the firm’s dealings with the mid-Atlantic mafia, which was widespread and extremely dangerous in the late 1970s. In 1978, the sister was raped by a client with whom she was already in a relationship.

In 1978, she had very little legal recourse as it was.

The lawyer went a step further, covering up the crime completely.

He and Mira were broken up at this point, but the fact that he’d covered up his sister’s rape to protect a client ate away at the lining of Mira’s stomach.

The sister was pregnant.

So was the lawyer’s new girlfriend, who was only 16, but her parents were excited about the relationship and the baby. 

Mira kept track. She’d convinced herself that it was her duty to keep track of them, no matter how many new ulcers it caused.

She wanted to rescue the two young boys under the lawyer’s manipulative wing, but as she and her sister planned the kidnapping/rescue, they knew they’d only be able to help one. They chose the girlfriend’s son because they worried that if they chose the sister’s son, the mafia might come after them, and they’d be unable to hide.

Temporary madness, Mira would say years later, temporary madness from a nagging sense of ethical obligation she had to the children of awful people.

But by the time Mira realized her temporary madness, it was too late: she was settled in New York City with her son.

She wondered why, after a brief, month-long police investigation in Minnesota, the lawyer had stopped looking.

Benson remembered that by the time Mira was 35, already a decorated sergeant, she saw the world as unbearably cruel. Mira was dedicated, and Benson, only eight years younger, used to joke that she wanted to be Mira when she “grew up,” but Mira sometimes couldn’t bear the cruelty that she so often actively witnessed, actively tried to correct. After two years with SVU, Mira transferred back to homicide. Homicide was easier for her.

On the night that Benson heard that Harry Lonegan — the boy who was waiting for the heart in a cooler on the helicopter that Benson wouldn’t let take off, thinking for a split second that gray areas and blues and greens and purples had never done her any good — had died, waiting for another new heart, she thought of Mira, who’d have been disappointed in her.

_Have I taught you nothing, Liv? Save the kid, ask questions later._

The thought that she’d been complicit in enabling an unbearably cruel world for a child had been gnawing at Benson all day. Now, as Noah slept and cars honked five flights below, she sat at her kitchen counter with a legal pad and pen.

**Will Zadon, b. 1947**

**Mira Margolis, b. 1960**

**1978 - Mira’s 18, Will’s 31, Daniel Zadon born**

**1979 - Paul Margolis born**

**Minneapolis: Will passed Bar in MN, FL, and NY. Will in MN 77-79?**

There was no way, Benson assured herself.

The fact that the timelines lined up didn’t even count as circumstantial evidence. She was letting the events of the last few weeks, the last few months, get to her.

Amy Rankin’s body had washed up near the crime scene where Will Zadon had been murdered or dumped. Amy was Mira’s husband’s secret daughter, the product of an affair. That was the only — not even circumstantial — connection between Mira and Will.

Benson ripped off the top sheet of paper, crumpled it, and threw it in the garbage.

Her heart raced for a few seconds with the fear that her mind had drifted away from her, a lieutenant with 27 years on the job, 24 involving some sort of detective work, asking herself whether there was a connection between Mira and Will, two people who could not have possibly known each other.

Except for Will’s passing the bar in Minnesota in 1975, which suggested that he and Mira were in the same state in the late 1970s.

Even that barely counted as circumstantial.

Benson scrubbed her face with her hand. She curled up under a blanket on the couch, absentmindedly watching NY1’s coverage of the Franchella case, of the tragic story of Harry Lonegan dying while waiting for a heart transplant.

Stone had tried to assure her that she’d done right, that she’d avoid the sort of decision that encouraged black market organ dealers. He’d kindly offered her Mets tickets (as if that made up for the debacle with Daniel’s passport), which he apparently acquired by the handful because he was once an MLB player himself. He told her that a few Mets games would be a good learning experience for Noah: you invest all your hopes in them and reliably, consistently, they disappoint you.

She’d responded to that with a friendly laugh. 

Her phone chimed. She wrapped herself in the blanket and reached towards the coffee table.

_I love you_.

_Where have you been?_ she texted back.

_Right now I’m outside your building._

A second message from him, thirty seconds later: _I was in the neighborhood. If you tell me to go away I will._

_Go stand under the security camera. I’ll buzz you up._

When she opened the door for him, his shoulders fell, and his eyes seemed to plead for forgiveness. “Come in,” she said, and she laid an open hand over the back of his trenchcoat as she led him inside.

They stood in silence in the kitchen. He reached a hand out to her. She took it.

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and swirled his thumb into her palm. She embraced him and kissed the side of his head. “You’ve been in Miami this whole time?”

He nodded into her shoulder. “I love you,” he said, his voice muffled by her sweatshirt and the sobs caught in his throat.

“I love you,” she promised.

He lifted his head and wiped his eyes. “I’ve accepted a job with Rita Calhoun’s firm, for now. It’ll give me time to look for something … better. If you’re still mad at me, you have every right to be.”

“Furious,” she said, but through her tears, she smiled.

He removed his coat and set it on the kitchen counter. Underneath, he wore a dress shirt, sweater, jeans, and a sport coat, what seemed like a hundred layers on this unseasonably cold mid-March night.

“I love you,” he repeated.

“Rafa.”

“You needed me to say _I love you_ , not _I fucked up badly and now I have to move on because I’m afraid of breaking your heart_ , and in the meantime, I broke your heart.” He took her head in his hands and kissed her, slow and sweet and desperate. “One reason I’m going to hell someday: I broke Olivia Benson’s heart.”

“Don’t you dare say that about my best friend.”

He kissed all the tears off her face. “I wish you’d found me one of those times you went to the bar. But maybe that’s how it was supposed to be because SVU needed a lieutenant — the best lieutenant — and Noah needed you to be his mother.”

She let out a soft “ugh” in response to how treacly, but how _true_ , that sounded. Drawing him into another embrace, tighter this time, she let herself believe — in spite of her history, in spite of all the empty spaces in her soul, in spite of the lessons learned from the repetitiveness of the last thirty, thirty-five years — that Rafael Barba was the one exception, the one who’d stay, or at the very least, the one who would, again and again, come back to her.

“Liv,” he said, taking her hand, kissing the inside of her wrist, “I promise —”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. “Please, Rafa, I can’t handle promises right now.”

“I know. No excuses.”

“You can make one promise to me.”

“Yes,” he said, “anything.”

“If you leave again —”

“I’m not —”

“If you leave again, you’ll come back.”

“Yes. Of course. I promise, Liv, you and I are —”

“Not now,” she said. “Not yet.”

“I understand. But I am glad to be home.”

“Did you see your mother?”

He let out a small, almost sarcastic, laugh. “She and I haven’t been on speaking terms since the trial.”

“I’m sorry.” She reached out and, pulling him closer again, absentmindedly ran her fingertips along his hairline, then up and down the back of his neck. “Hey, if you —”

Benson was cut off by Barba’s ringing phone. 

When he answered, she heard his side of the conversation:

“Are you sure?”  
“Okay. They’re taking it seriously. They’d better be taking it seriously.”  
“This is … bad.”  
“So am I. I’m here with Olivia now. The Zadon case was hers before it went to the feds.”  
“I will.”

Barba covered his mouth with his hand, as if he was hiding a dry heave — a quarter-century with SVU, she’d recognize that expression anywhere — and set the phone on Benson’s kitchen counter.

“What happened?” she asked, touching Barba’s elbow.

“Laura Perez has been missing for three days. She was supposed to move into a new apartment, never showed up, and hasn’t been at work either.”

Benson’s eyes grew wide. “I’ll call Captain Eames from the federal task force, since this could be connected to the Zadons, and Lieutenant Bernard in case it’s connected to her client who might have been pushed off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yes,” Barba said, “please.”

Benson made her calls and she watched Barba put his trenchcoat back on, getting ready to leave. He thanked her, his tone distant, a little empty. “Rafa,” she warned. “Talk to me. Don’t leave without talking to me.”

“Can I come for dinner, bring my friend Noah a cheeseburger?” he asked. 

“Yes, of course.”

He started for the door. “Rafa?” she prompted.

“Please don’t ask me the question you want to ask me.”

“Noah misses you,” she said instead.

“I know. I miss him too. I miss you.”

“Let’s wait and see if your friend’s disappearance has anything to do with my case.”

His face fell in disappointment, the sort of disappointment that simultaneously comes as a surprise and yet is entirely expected, familiar almost. Benson recognized that disappointment. She had been there herself too many times before.

—

On Saturday, Barba brought cheeseburgers. They talked, and tried to laugh, and for split seconds, they were reminiscent of a family. He kissed her goodnight, but there was a sense that a gulf had re-opened between them. They both walked away that night wondering if they were fools.

On Monday, Rita Calhoun was at SVU representing a new client. “Feds give you anything about Ms. Perez in Miami?” she asked Benson after their interview wrapped up. 

“No,” Benson said.

She wasn’t lying: the feds, including Eames, had refused to provide her with any information on their progress in finding Daniel Zadon. Lieutenant Bernard had been in contact with Miami PD and Florida state police, who suspected a link between Laura’s disappearance and Amy Rankin’s death.

“Don’t be mad at him,” Rita said. “He’s an asshole, but he loves you.”

Benson rolled her eyes.

“So what if they were fucking for a couple of weeks? Not a big deal.”

“Oh my God.”

“We’ve been around the block a few times, you and I. We’re not twenty-five. Why are you so shocked?”

“That wasn’t an _oh my God I’m shocked_ ,” Benson said. “It was an _oh my God you’re inappropriate_.”

Rita smiled sarcastically. “My asshole friend Rafael has been in love with you for years. Don’t screw it up. Either of you.”

—

Barba came over for dinner again the next Saturday and regaled her with tales from his new job on the Other Side. He read Noah a story. His voice shook.

He was frightened for his friend, who’d now been missing for ten days, a bad sign.

And Benson — selfishly, she knew — couldn’t get past what Rita had told her, that Barba was sleeping with Laura during his “lost weekend” in Miami, that he’d so quickly found comfort in someone else’s arms.

But after all McCoy and Stone had put him through, maybe — she wasn’t sure what to think.

Early Monday morning, Joseph Zadon’s body washed up on the shore near Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.


	6. Implausible

SVU was precariously short-staffed again. Carisi was recovering from a concussion after he’d tried but failed to save Jules Hunter from a hitman, and Rollins, the only other senior detective on the squad, was covering a few extra shifts, but with Jesse at home and a sitter to pay, there was only so much she could do. Benson feared she’d lose Fin too, as soon as his sergeant’s orders came in, because Dodds certainly wouldn’t be so kind as to keep a good team together. Not so kind to her, at least.

Benson was already burning a candle at three ends when Eames knocked on her door at the start of the workday, just as she’d first settled in behind her desk. “Come in,” Benson said, spotting Eames behind the blinds.

Rollins opened the door for Eames, who held a cup of coffee in each hand, along with a paper bag balanced carefully between her fingers and one of the coffee cups. Eames dropped the bag on Benson’s desk and handed her a cup. “Peace offering,” she said. “Coffee and a danish.”

“Thank you, Captain. Please, sit.”

Eames sat. Rollins nodded and closed the door, returning to the squadroom.

“A better peace offering,” Benson said, “would be to let SVU back in to the Daniel Zadon case, since his most recent crimes — the ones where the statutes of limitation aren’t up — happened at a day school in Manhattan.”

“I told you, Daniel’s all yours as soon as we find him.”

“Even if he committed other crimes while he was on the run?”

“Well.”

“I think we should work together on Daniel and Will Zadon.”

“Will’s murder isn’t an SVU case.”

“He covered up decades of Daniel’s sexual assaults. He enabled the most recent one because Daniel’s priors never turned up in the school’s background check.”

Eames set her coffee on the desk, folded her hands in her lap, and pursed her lips as she considered — or at least Benson hoped she was considering — the next steps. “I came here to bring you a danish and let you know that we are looking at two suspects in Will’s murder: Daniel and Laura. Both are missing, so if anything new comes across your desk —”

“You came here with your danish thinking I know something about where Laura is?”

“No. I wanted to apologize for shutting SVU out of a case that will ultimately be theirs.”

“You just said —”

“I said, when Daniel is found, he’s yours.”

“I have no idea where Laura is. Neither do her friends and colleagues. It’s been two weeks. They’re very worried.”

“Off the record,” Eames said, leaning back in her chair, “do you believe there was a connection between the two bodies found at the Staten Island Ferry dock last month?”

“You can’t come in to my precinct, tell me I can’t participate in an investigation that Manhattan SVU needs to be a part of if the victims and their parents are to get any justice in the city criminal courts, then ask me for information about your case. Tell me what you know about Joseph, and I’ll tell you what I’m thinking with regard to Amy Rankin.”

“That’s fair.”

“Is it?” Benson asked, hearing a touch of Barba-like snark creep into her voice.

“Joseph had a gunshot wound through the forehead, not unlike what the detectives in Tallahassee saw with his twin brother twelve years ago.”

“So Laura’s a suspect on a possible revenge motive?”

“We know the Zadons made Laura miserable, and while we still have to rule her out procedurally, her profile doesn’t fit. We’ve been talking to Florida state police, particularly to one detective who’s insisted all these years that Geoff’s murder wasn’t a robbery gone wrong but a hit job. She’s never been able to establish motive, but I buy her theory. You want my “what if” on this? I’ll give you my “what if.””

“What if,” Benson said, “Joseph, angry at Geoff for supporting their sister Dara over the rest of the family, over what Will considered the family’s integrity, had him killed?”

“Bingo.”

“But then how did he and Laura wind up married?”

“One of my detectives suggested an alternate motive. He thinks the motive wasn’t protecting Daniel or Will, but jealousy.”

“You remember that case here in the 90s, where the woman married her late husband’s best friend, and more than two years later, when her former mother-in-law put a hit out on the new husband —”

“That’s right,” Eames said, “it turned out that the asshole pushed his best friend off some rocks in Central Park and staged an accident so he could trick the wife into falling in love with him.”

“Does your gut say this is that kind of situation, though?”

“No. There’s too much else going on with the Zadon family.”

“Agreed.” Benson stood up and walked over to an empty whiteboard in the corner of her office. “So, since you held up your end of the deal …” She flipped the whiteboard, revealing a map shed’ drawn in black marker connecting all the pieces that seemed — almost preternaturally — connected through Laura, and through Benson herself.

Eames approached the board and squinted at the map. “That’s Mira Margolis, the lieutenant, the cold case back in 1999.”

“You remember that?”

“My husband had just been killed in the line of duty. I felt terrible for her family. They liked the son for it, I remember, and he was —”

“He was exonerated years later. Five years in prison, the full negotiated sentence, for a crime he didn’t commit.”

“You’re thinking that Paul Margolis is Will Zadon’s son?”

“I’m not. Not really. The dates happen to line up. And the Mira Margolis case is connected to Amy Rankin — she’s the floater they found downtown on the same day they found Will — because Mira’s husband Neil is Amy’s father, and Paul is technically, though not biologically, Amy’s half brother.”

“So,” Eames said, starting to pace the office floor, “pull the Margolis cold case, work that for a while, see what it does for your map here.”

“When should I work that cold case, in my “spare time”? Besides, this whole map is bad police work. I’m assuming connections between events based on not-even-circumstantial evidence.”

“This,” Eames said, circling her hand over the place where Benson had connected Mira and the Zadons through Amy, “reminds me of the kind of work my former partner used to do.”

“Enthusiastically misguided puzzle solving that’s actually terrible detective work?”

“Yes.” Eames tapped her knuckles against the whiteboard. “Problem was — and it was frustrating as hell, let me tell you — Goren was almost always right.”

—

“Melinda,”Benson said, walking into the ME’s office at the end of the workday, “I need —”

“Jules Hunter autopsy is on its way back to you,” Warner said, turning towards a stretcher, away from Benson.

“I’m here to ask for an update on Amy Rankin’s cause of death.”

“Amy Rankin?” Now Warner turned to face Benson, revealing an exasperated expression. “That’s a lower Manhattan homicide case.”

“It relates to one of my open cases.”

“Oh?” Warner said, heading for a laptop computer propped up on a metal desk away from the cadavers. “Which is?”

“Can’t disclose.”

“And I can’t get in trouble with Dodds and the DA for humoring you again,” Warner said.

“I’m sensing distrust.”

“Maybe you need to take a few weeks off.”

“Excuse me?”

“Can I speak as a friend?”

“This isn’t about Barba,” Benson snapped.

“I didn’t say that. You’ve had a lot on your plate these last six months.”

“I’m investigating a cold case. Lieutenant Mira Margolis, 1999. It was Brooklyn’s, but they never gave a shit about Mira, even though she headed up one of their precincts. Her son, who was 20 at the time, was convicted of her murder. You want to know about a worse screwup on Jack McCoy’s part than Barba’s murder trial? It was Mira’s son’s case. In 2000, McCoy and Abbie Carmichael cut a deal on shoddy evidence, but a jury would have sent Paul away for 20 to life otherwise.”

“I can’t —”

“Paul was exonerated by DNA evidence and two alibi witnesses, but not until he’d already served his full five year sentence.”

Warner let out a long sigh. “And Amy Rankin is connected to all of this how?”

“She was Mira’s husband’s daughter. Product of an affair from when he used to go to Miami to visit his elderly grandmother. I only found out a few weeks ago.”

“We’re ruling Amy’s death a suicide,” Warner said.

“On what —”

“On absence of evidence of a struggle.”

“You guys get to make decisions on absence of evidence around here?”

“We were thorough,” Warner assured her.

“There are cameras on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

“Yes, and one caught an image of Amy falling into the East River. Couldn’t see her on the span, though.”

“What about —”

“I’ve been doing this job a long time. Amy was alive when she hit the water, and there was no indication of opiates or any other drugs in her system.”

“I’ve been doing my job a long time too, and I know that my perps go for drugs like GHB and Rohypnol because they’re out of a victim’s system in a matter of hours.”

“It’s a possibility,” Warner admitted, “but you would have to bring me evidence that someone was after Amy, and that evidence would have to be —”

“Non-circumstantial, I know.”

“—for me to be able to rule the cause of death uncertain.”

“Okay.” Benson rubbed her eyes. “I’ll get you that evidence.”

“Liv,” Warner said, “rest.”

“Thanks.” She nodded, said goodbye, and headed out the door of 1PP just as Barba was walking in.

“Rafa,” she called as Barba passed her.

He whirled around and dropped his shoulders in defeat, a now-familiar gesture.

“I’m heading home for the day,” she told him.

“I’ve got to wrap up a case for a client.”

“Which client?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters because you’re lying.”

“Liv,” he said, eyeing her sideways.

“Come with me for a cup of coffee.”

“I’ve got to —”

“If you came here to talk to Warner about Amy Rankin, she’s already chewed me out for sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong. You’re a defense attorney now, so you’ll get it worse.”

He didn’t like _you’re a defense attorney now_ , she could tell. 

“All right,” he said, following her outside.

They sat together in a booth at a nearby diner, drinking coffee and shivering a little in the chill that even April hadn’t been able to chase out of the city.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

“I miss my old job,” he admitted.

“You’re the one who resigned.”

“I couldn’t have stayed there. And look how quickly McCoy replaced me with Stone. That was his endgame as soon as I was arrested. He saw me as a liability, and he was right.”

“I thought I told you not to say things like that about my best friend.”

Barba picked up his phone, which had been sitting on the table next to his coffee cup, and began to scroll. “There’s a reason I wanted to ask Warner about Amy,” he said. “Brace yourself.”

She breathed in deep. Barba passed her the phone.

Neil Tiposi had set up a GoFundMe for funeral expenses for his daughter.

Benson gritted her teeth as she read.

Neil was asking for money to cover funeral and burial expenses and to transport Amy’s body from New York to Miami. That made sense so far: Neil was a middle-school social studies teacher who wouldn’t be able to retire before he turned 80.

What didn’t make sense was that he was asking for five million dollars.

What definitely didn’t make sense was that in the middle of rambling on about how he needed to settle the lawsuits against Amy, he’d brought up Mira’s murder: _My beloved wife Mira was killed 19 years ago. As many of our family and friends surely understand, she was killed during a dispute with our son Paul. Paul was fortunately set free and has resolved the issues that led to that sad event, but I also need to be able to continue to support him._

Benson felt her face turn hot. Paul had not killed Mira. He’d been exonerated. The evidence against him had always been shoddy. And here was Neil, trying to raise five million dollars on a site where he’d openly, and incorrectly, disclosed that his son had murdered his wife.

Mira’s sister had been living and working in London for the last decade. Benson would have to contact her. Samantha Margolis had never liked Neil, and even Mira admitted that she’d settled, because as the single mother of a kidnapped child living in New York City in the 1980s, what else was she going to do?

“Liv?” Barba reached across the table to cover her shaking hand with his. “Talk to me.”

“This is overwhelming,” she said, and she could hear her own voice breaking.

“Dinner’s on me tonight.” Barba tilted his head toward the counter at the front of the diner. “Cheeseburgers, for you, me, and Noah?”

“I’ll accept that offer.” She quickly wiped away a rogue tear that ran down her cheek. 

“Oh,” he said, heartbreak crossing his face. Standing halfway, he swung around and sat with her on her side of the booth, throwing an arm around her.

“Please don’t,” she said. “It’ll only make things worse.”

“Can we talk more at home?” he asked. “At your place, I mean.”

She nodded.

—

“Cheeseburgers again?” Noah asked when Benson and Barba set the table.

“You’re complaining?” Benson said.

“No.”

“Thank Uncle Rafa. He brought these home for us.”

“Thanks,” Noah said with a hint of sarcasm, as much as a six-year-old could get across. He sat at the table and started on his cheeseburger while Benson and Barba were still unwrapping theirs.

“Did you finish your homework?”

“Yes.”

Barba raised an eyebrow. “How much homework is there in kindergarten these days?”

“Just math and writing,” Noah told him.

“No torts? No contracts? No civil procedure?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Benson said, her expression brightening for the first time all day.

“Torts are those big raspberry things from the diner?”

“Yes,” Barba answered.

Noah begged Barba to please read him two stories before bed, and Barba obliged. He was surprised when Noah threw his arms around him, hugging him tight.

“What was that?” he asked when Benson returned from Noah’s bedroom. He patted the spot next to him on the couch.

“The hug?”

“I thought he was mad at me.”

“He’s six,” she said, sitting next to Barba. “You came back. That’s all that matters to him.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m angry. I don’t know what to think. You?”

“Worried.”

“Neil was always somewhat stupid, Mira’s sister and I agreed on that. I don’t know if even know he has any clue that Paul wasn’t Mira’s biological son. But this, I don’t know what to make of a guy who accuses his son of a crime he’s already been exonerated for, in a plea to his family and friends on a crowdfunding site. I’m wondering if Neil could have had something to do with Mira’s murder. We thought he was just stupid.”

“Aren’t a significant proportion of murderers “just stupid”?” Barba asked.

“Yes. And most people who organize hits and heists manage to pull it off out of nothing but dumb luck. Still, it’s hard to believe Neil was involved.”

Barba stretched an arm across the back of the couch. “Nobody liked him for the murder at the time?”

“He had an alibi, and years later the DNA cleared him too. You knew … something … about Mira’s case back then, didn’t you?”

“Very little. I knew about the kidnapping. It was a rumor, but my colleague thought it was worth investigating. She was the only one in the DA’s office, in fact, who thought it was anything more than a rumor. That’s why I didn’t think twice about it myself, but I couldn’t disclose that information to you at the time. I didn’t know you.:

“Maybe Neil had some peripheral involvement in the murder, maybe he brought the murderer into their lives. But this GoFundMe, where he’s so publicly throwing Paul to the wolves, I don’t know what to think.”

Barba’s eyes were sloped with worry. “This is too much, isn’t it?”

“And, you, meanwhile, your girlfriend’s missing.”

“Olivia.” He said the name loudly, forcefully, but without any real anger behind it. 

“It’s okay. Rita told me.”

He raised his knee to the level of the couch cushions and turned to face Benson. “Rita told you what, exactly?” He shook his head and waved his free hand. “Nope. Let me make this clear: Laura is not my girlfriend. We” — he cleared his throat — “were looking for comfort during very difficult times in our lives.”

“You were having sex so you didn’t have to think,” she corrected.

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

Barba rubbed his forehead. A narrow, uncomfortable smile formed on his face. “You don’t expect details, do you?”

“No, of course not.”

“All I’ll tell you is, the flu is a very sudden-onset illness.”

“What?” Reflexively, she moved closer. “She gave you the flu?”

“No. We were — almost — and I was” — he used one hand to indicate throwing up — “and shivering with a high fever. Laura said she’s not a believer, but to her it looked like something was telling us not to go any further with our, uh, flirtations. After that, she decided she agreed with Rita that you and I are a good” — here he flashed her a real grin — “ship.”

_Ship_ , she mouthed.

“Fan fiction term for a relationship that fans root for.”

_Fan fiction._ “Oh!” she said out loud. “Neil’s daughter’s fraud case.”

“The case was less about fan fiction than it was about horrendous privacy violations,” Barba said, “but because Amy’s endgame, at least during the last few years, was more likes on her stories, Laura’s law firm had to research the entire “fanfiction culture,” as she called it.”

“Did they read the stories?”

“Who, the attorneys?”

“The attorneys, the detectives, everyone.” 

“I’d assume a cursory read at least.”

“She might have disclosed some important things in there, either on purpose or subconsciously. The feds had a literature expert read the notes in the JonBenet Ramsey case, you know.”

“To find loads and loads of inadmissible circumstantial evidence?” 

“I’m going to call Captain Eames tomorrow and make the suggestion.”

“And she’ll listen to you?”

“I’m very convincing.”

“Are you?” Another smile, sweet and lopsided and teasing this time.

“Very, very convincing.”

Holding out a hand, he waved her in closer with his long fingers. She obliged and kissed his lips, languorous and sweet and slow like in the kitchen two weeks ago. Scooting over, she climbed into his lap. He raised his eyebrows.

“How many times,” he said, kissing her face, neck, and shoulders after every phrase, “did you talk me into taking on cases that ended up with me arguing in front of the Court of Appeals about changing statutes?”

“Mm,” was all she said.

“Do that again.”

“Do what again?”

“That _mm_. I like it.”

“Rafa, sweetheart, that’s your job.”

“To make you moan?”

“Yes, but that wasn’t a moan. When I moan, you’ll know it.”

“I have a few … argumentative strategies … in that area,” he said, craning upwards to kiss her throat. “We’re a good ship, you and I.”

“We are.” Their foreheads were pressed together. “Do you want to continue this in my bedroom?”

“I do. Will it be —”

“We’ll close the door,” she promised, tugging on his belt buckle, “and in the morning —”

Her thought was interrupted by a repetitive melody behind them. “God. Damn. It,” she said, climbing off of Barba and reaching for the phone on the coffee table. She examined the screen. “Warner. After nine o’clock.”

“Hi, Melinda,” she said into her phone.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late, Liv. I don’t have Captain Eames’s personal number, I don’t know if she wants anyone in the city offices to have it, and I need some information before I decide how to … proceed.”

“Captain Eames? So this is about the Zadon’s.”

“We ran Will Zadon’s DNA to make sure the feds were looking at the right people and that Eames’s team hadn’t missed anything, and … they missed something. We think. Is it possible that Will is Daniel’s father, not his uncle?”

“When we were investigating, Carisi told me that there were rumors in the family, but it was just talk. Please don’t tell me —”

“He’s not the father in the way you’re thinking. Daniel’s parents are definitely not related. If what we’re seeing is correct, the woman who Daniel thought was his mother wasn’t his mother.”

Daniel was born in Blaine, Minnesota in December 1978. 

Paul Margolis was — according to Mira — born in Minneapolis in February 1979.

“I’d say re-test just to be safe,” Benson told Warner. “I’m going to pay Alex Eames a visit tomorrow morning to see if she can put a different DNA test through your office that may be related to this case.”

“Really? Who?”

“I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”

It was a nonsense theory, unsupported by logic, unsupported by anything vaguely resembling sound evidence. 

Benson’s arms were at her sides. Barba had wrapped his own arms around her in a sideways embrace, a puppy-dog expression in his eyes and on his lips.

“What?” she asked.

“I love you.”

“I think —”

“You think you’re going to be working tonight.”

“Yes.” She turned and mussed a hand through his hair, smiling when a cowlick popped up. “Do you still want to stay?”

“Anything you want.”

“I don’t want to be alone with my own thoughts right now.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That somehow — entirely implausibly, entirely without good evidence — in 1979, my friend Mira kidnapped the wrong baby.”


	7. Heart Failure

When SVU had been alerted to Daniel Zadon’s assaults at the day school where he’d been working for more than two years, there were no complaining witnesses, no outcry witnesses, until Carisi directly questioned parents, teachers, and students. In court a few months back, Daniel’s lawyer had leveraged this fact to get him released without bail. 

Benson faulted Stone for Daniel’s convenient disappearance and their subsequent loss of jurisdiction, but she knew that she bore some of the blame too. The initial report had been anonymous, from a man in North Carolina who claimed to be a retired detective who’d known all about how far Will Zadon was willing to go to protect his nephew. Carisi, who was worried about how well their warrants would hold up in court, had traced the call back to Roger Deimant, who was, indeed, a retired NYPD detective living in North Carolina. “Don’t mention his name,” Benson had said. “If his name gets out in the press, or even if it gets back to the Zadons, people will be afraid to report anonymously.”

She was thinking about Roger Deimant at midnight as she sat in a chair in the corner of her bedroom usually reserved for clothes she wanted to keep off the floor, working on her tablet. Two discrepancies weighed on her mind: first, standard procedure for tips on endangered minors was to go to ACS first, who would contact SVU themselves, and a retired detective first-grade would surely have known that; second, Daniel’s very-much-sealed prior assaults had taken place in Miami (and Geoff’s murder, in Tallahassee), but Deimant had never lived or worked in Florida.

Barba was asleep under the comforter, snoring lightly. It was amusing, sweet even, how he’d made himself comfortable, folding his trousers and button-down shirt and leaving them on top of the dresser as if he’d been intimately familiar with the room for years.

What if, she asked herself, Deimant knew perfectly well that the proper procedure was to contact ACS first?

He was working in New York when Daniel assaulted his cousins (possibly his siblings, if what Warner turned up was correct) in Miami. When Geoff and Dara came forward, when Geoff was murdered in Tallahassee, Deimant was a detective in Brooklyn.

Benson logged into an NYPD database — they’d see the login came from her home, from her personal wi-fi, but she’d deal with that later, since Eames had directed her to look at the Margolis cold case, hadn’t she? — and searched for cases that Deimant had worked on.

In the 1980s, he’d worked multiple cases with Cal Walker, the lead detective on the Mira Margolis murder.

Until 1990, he’d been Walker’s partner. 

Deimant — possibly, plausibly — had contacted SVU first, before ACS, because he specifically wanted Benson herself to know about Daniel. He was, perhaps, trying to tip her off to the connection between Will Zadon and Mira Margolis.

“Is this crazy?” she said aloud. “If it’s completely out there, if it’s bad detective work, I’m retiring in September.

Barba continued snoring.

Taking her tablet with her, she climbed under the covers and nudged his shoulder. He let out a startled snort, followed by an “mmph,” and rolled to his other side, facing her.

She told him her theory. He listened. 

“Liv,” he said, “do you know who Roger Deimant is?”

“He’s important to Mira’s case.”

“He’s my ex.”

“The one you were with when —”

“That’s him.”

“Then we’re back to the universe not making sense.”

“Or too much sense,” Barba said, sitting up.

“Do you know if he worked with Cal Walker on the Margolis case?”

“He would have told me, especially because I was an ADA in the same county and we were very, very careful about conflicts of interest after we disclosed.”

“Are you sure? It was a long time ago. Maybe you don’t remember.”

“I remember everything from that period of my life in full focus. I wish I didn’t. Roger is a good man, and he clearly did the right thing tipping you off to what he knew about Daniel. Don’t drag him into this.”

“Why did he wait so long to come forward?”

“Maybe he was in danger. Please don’t drag Roger into this.”

She didn’t want to tell Barba what she was thinking. Deimant was 60. Mortality might have started to tug at his conscience enough for him to want to tip Benson off to not only Daniel’s crimes, but to the Zadon family’s connection to Mira, and maybe to his own connection, through Walker, to that case. Deimant probably wasn’t willing to reveal that he had been corrupt, or that he’d aided Walker in his coverup of Mira’s actual murderer.

In Minnesota, Mira’s ex-boyfriend had been a shady lawyer with at least one mafia-linked client, the man who’d raped his sister while in a relationship with her. That, Benson knew for sure.

In the 80s and 90s, there were at least two dozen known mafia-affiliated cops in NYPD. A few had covered up murders.

“What’s going on?” Barba asked. The words came out quickly. She could tell he was upset.

“Given what Warner said, if I’m right about Mira’s ex-boyfriend being Will Zadon, then Mira’s death might have been a mob hit because she took the wrong baby, the biological son of the mobster who’d emptied his pockets in child support and hush money. Maybe the lawyer — who may or may not have been Will Zadon — tipped him off. Maybe Walker tipped him off.”

“You think Walker was mobbed up and pinned Mira’s murder on Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Then why would the mobster let his own son be sentenced?”

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to Eames in the morning. Definitely the feds’ jurisdiction now.” She stood up, left the tablet on the dresser, and returned to bed. “Only time you’ll ever hear me say this: I’m not touching Walker with a ten-foot pole. The feds can handle him.”

She didn’t realize that her hands were shaking until he grabbed onto one to steady it. “You’re scared?” he asked.

That was not the sort of thing she admitted to.

“Feds’ jurisdiction,” she insisted.

“You, yielding jurisdiction, never,” he said, shifting so he could invite her into an embrace.

She accepted, leaning her head into his chest. “Whoever killed Mira had no qualms about killing a police lieutenant. I’ll talk to Eames tomorrow, and then I’ll get in touch with Paul, see if he’ll let us run his DNA against all the databases.”

“You’ll need a new sample. You’re NYPD. You can’t use the sample that was used to exonerate him.”

“You sound like a defense attorney.”

“Don’t worry, okay?” His fingers played with her hair. “Don’t worry.”

“Same goes for you.”

“And of course I sound like a defense attorney. I am a defense attorney.”

“For now, at least.”

“For now.”

“Rafa,” she said, “why did you and Deimant break up?”

“You said you wouldn’t touch —”

“I said I wouldn’t touch Walker with a ten-foot pole.”

“Roger — Detective Deimant — is a good man and a very good detective. We ended it because he wasn’t out to his family. I was 29, he was 40, what kind of life were we going to have if he refused to tell them about me? It was my fault. I was selfish and stubborn.”

Benson kissed Barba’s collarbone through his undershirt. “I’ll tell Eames to look at Walker. I won’t bring up Deimant. If Eames finds a connection on her own, though —”

“Let her look.” His voice broke. “I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, no, whatever happens, cariño, okay?” He kissed the top of her head. “When that relationship ended, I thought that was it for me. Yelina left me for Alex just before I started law school, a few weeks before, and that hit me like a ton of bricks. Roger and I started out as a ridiculous flirtation, where Brooklyn SVU was taking bets on when we’d get together, and, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“Because,” she said, propping herself up so they were facing each other, “sometimes you have to talk to someone who can take a little weight off that ton of bricks.”

“You believe that?”

“I’ve had to learn, the hard way. So if Eames —”

“Sleep,” he said. “Sueño, mi amor, you need it.”

She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. When she was worried, Barba the brass-egoed prosecutor was practically a puppy. Mistakes aside — and he’d made some big ones — he loved her. For a moment, she felt lucky.

She fell asleep with his arms around her.

—

In the morning, Barba returned to his apartment to change into a suit for arraignment court — “I hope I remember to stand behind the correct podium,” he joked — and after Lucy arrived, Benson went to 1PP and spoke to Eames about the anonymous tip that now led her to believe that Will Zadon was the ex Mira had told her about way back when, and that Will’s mob connections may have gotten Mira killed.

Eames held up a finger and started to pace back and forth across her office. “If I tell you something —”

“It doesn’t leave this room,” Benson promised.

“Back in our Major Case days, my partner and I were investigating exactly that. Goren got into a fight with Tucker from IAB over it. Tucker wanted more evidence against Walker, but Goren didn’t have it.” Eames stopped in her tracks and, pressing the palm of her hand into the back of a chair, squinted in Benson’s direction. “The fact that Walker was investigating your friend’s murder never came up between you and Tucker?”

“No,” she admitted. “I never really talked to him about Mira. I don’t think he knew we were friends.”

“Say no more.”

Benson smiled. “So, what I need from you is permission to talk to Paul, to ask him if he’ll take a new DNA test that we can run against Will Zadon, CODIS, and all the international databases they’ll let us — or, you — use.”

“You seem more confident in your theory now. I’ll get you the permission you need. Do you think the person who left the anonymous tip was also involved?”

“I think whoever left that tip did a remarkable service, a good deed,” she said.

“You know I’ll have to —”

“Investigative procedure. I know.”

From 1PP, Benson headed to Bay Ridge, where Paul had been renting an apartment ever since Amy’s death. Neil had returned to Miami, but Paul wanted to be back in the neighborhood he grew up in, back near his mother’s memory. 

“My dad was scared, that’s why he tried to sell me out on that website,” he told Benson. “He’s scared he won’t be able to pay for all of the settlements against Amy, all the legal fees. I didn’t kill my mom. You believe that, don’t you?”

“I know it,” Benson said. “DNA proved it. Your mother believed in doing whatever you have to do to save a life. That’s why she saved yours.”

Paul was grown now, almost forty, gray streaks near his temples, surely the result of five years of imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit. Behind his beard and glasses, Benson noticed, Paul looked a lot like Daniel.

Could they have been twins?

“Paul,” she said, “what do you know about Will Zadon?”

He sat with her at his kitchen table. “That’s the guy they were looking at, the body, when they found Amy.”

“Yes.”

Paul shrugged. “Other than that, nothing.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

“I’m so sorry for what they put you through.”

“You fought for me, Aunt Liv.”

“I tried. I can’t say much right now, and that’s for your own safety, but would you be willing to take a DNA test? As NYPD, I’m barred from using the DNA that exonerated you.”

“Will it help Amy?”

“It might.”

“I don’t think she killed herself.”

“Neither do I, but we’ll let Lieutenant Bernard handle that.”

“Amy’s lawyer, she’s missing, you know.”

“I know,” Benson said.

“Is any of this about Amy at all?”

“I can’t tell you. Like I said, it’s for your own safety. But Paul, I promise you, I promise I will share the results with you.”

“I know she wasn’t my biological mother,” Paul said.

Benson nodded.

“I know my biological mother was the 16-year-old fiancé of a shady lawyer in Minneapolis.”

She nodded again.

“So what else could DNA tell you?”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“I trust you,” Paul assured her.

“You don’t have to.”

“My mother trusted you. Mom thought everyone in the world was an idiot — she had lots and lots of choice words — except for me, and for you.”

—

“Barba.”

“Raf?” 

“Excuse me?” Barba rolled his office chair backwards, forgetting that he had significantly less space here than he’d had when he worked for the Manhattan DA, and smashed into the wall behind him. Clearing his throat, he asked who was calling.

“It’s Roger.”

Barba rolled the short distance back to his desk and saw an unfamiliar area code on the caller ID screen. He searched the number. North Carolina, indeed. 

“Raf,” he continued, “the feds are questioning me.”

Barba figured there was nothing Benson could do to stop Eames from tracing the original tip back to Roger as soon as she shared her theory of the crime. He hoped she’d done her best.

Of course she’d done her best, he corrected himself. Roger was still talking. He sounded exhausted.

“I don’t want to intrude on your life,” he said, his voice raspy, wistful, “and I never wanted you to know about the mistakes I made.”

“The crimes you committed.”

“I thought you’d understand, after the trial you were put through, after —”

“What I did doesn’t compare to conspiracy to cover up a murder.”

“It’s worse than that. It’s conspiracy to commit murder.”

“Don’t tell me that over the phone.”

“Walker either killed Mira Margolis himself or hired someone to do it. “

Barba stood and shut the blinds to the window that looked out on the paralegals’ cubicles. “I don’t hear from you for seventeen years, seventeen fucking years, after you decide your loyalty to your parents was stronger than your love for me — don’t think I’ve forgotten — and then you have the nerve to track me down at work and confess to criminal conspiracy?”

“It was never about my parents. It was always about the mistakes I made with helping Walker cover up the murder. Walker was mobbed up since at least ’83. One of few NYPD guys from that era they didn’t catch in the early 2000s.”

“Roger, why —”

“Will Zadon puts on a corporate lawyer act nowadays, but he was nothing more than a mob lawyer for most of his career, representing middle-management lowlifes. He was running a paternity scam on one of them. This guy was dating his sister, raped her, and, I mean, there wasn’t much you could do back then if you were already in a relationship with the person, but Will turned around and made her pretend she was pregnant. Will’s girlfriend was pregnant with twins and they figured they’d pass one of them off as the sister’s son. Margolis kidnapped one of the babies, and when the mobster found out twenty years later he had her killed and had the murder pinned on the son, through Walker.”

“My God,” Barba whispered, sinking back into his chair.

“You want to know what I think?”

“No,” Barba said, stretching out the syllable longer than he should have. “But tell me anyway.”

“I think he didn’t care whether or not Paul Margolis was his son. He just wanted revenge for being snowed over.”

“I know how he feels,” Barba couldn’t stop himself from saying.

For a few seconds, Roger was quiet. “Well, Raf,” he finally said, “in a couple weeks, a couple months, you might get your wish.”

“What do you mean?”

“Heart failure.”

“Oh, no, Roger, I didn’t —”

“My parents and my brother knew about you from the start. For you, your smile, your passion, everything, I swear to God I loved you. My kind, gorgeous, green-eyed ADA whose socks matched his ties, I loved you. I lied, Raf. I ended what we had because I didn’t want you to be part of my mis— my participation in a criminal conspiracy out of mistaken loyalty to an old friend. By the time I realized the depth of what Walker had done, it was too late.”

Barba was glad Roger couldn’t see the pain on his face. 

“Where’s Laura?” he demanded suddenly, when he realized that Roger might have information.

“Who?”

“Will Zadon’s former daughter-in-law.”

“She was never involved. Neither was Joseph or Dara or the two younger daughters. If she didn’t know, Walker and the guys he took orders from wouldn’t have gone after her.”

“What about Geoff?”

“The murder in Tallahassee. When Geoff was looking into Daniel’s background, for Dara’s sake, he figured out that Will was shaking down a mobster, and they knew he’d get to Margolis’s murder next. That’s all I know. Walker killed Mira. Back in 2006, when Geoff got in too deep, they had him killed too. I wouldn’t hold anything back, not now.”

“All right.” Barba wasn’t sure what to say. This was the second time in five years that someone he thought had betrayed him over a minor-in-the-larger-scheme-of-things romantic matter had actually betrayed a lot of people by getting caught up in a corruption scandal. “Thank you for coming forward.”

“I’m guilty,” Roger said.

That admission felt like a punch to Barba’s soul.

“I couldn’t have stopped Mira’s murder, because I didn’t exactly know what Walker was up to, but once I did, I shouldn’t have been so afraid for myself. I should have come forward, even if it got me killed. It would have saved Geoff Zadon’s life.”

Geoff was Laura’s great, epic, destiny-crushing love. He remembered her words. He still wondered why she’d married Joseph. 

Clearly there was more to the story than Roger, or Liv, or Captain Eames, knew. 

“So,” Barba said, “you swear you don’t know anything about the murders of Will and Joseph Zadon, or the disappearance of Laura Perez?”

“I swear,” Roger said. “What reason would I have to lie? I love you.”

“I’m not sure that I can forgive you, but I love you, too.”

“Don’t forgive me. I let an innocent man go to jail for five years. It could have been twenty if he hadn’t taken the plea. I’m not deserving of your forgiveness.”

—

A week later, Benson and Eames got the DNA results back: Paul Margolis and Daniel Zadon were twin brothers. Cordelia was 16 in 1978. They wondered if she was their mother, if she’d had two sets of twins. But they now knew that Will had used the circumstances of his sister’s rape to extort money from a mobster by pretending that Daniel was his baby. 

Walker was arrested on the eve of his retirement.


	8. Terms

The middle-management mobster who Will had scammed out of child support and hush money in the late 70s was dead. His associates were all gone too, except for a few men in their eighties and nineties who legitimately didn’t remember enough to make good witnesses. The only witness the feds could level against Walker was Roger Deimant. A week after Walker’s arrest, Roger came up to New York City to give his statement.

He stayed with his brother on the South Shore of Long Island while he waited for the feds to arrest him. Eames had instructed her team to hang back for a while on account of Roger’s failing health. Walker confessed to having shot Mira Margolis with his own hands and to having made the phone calls that ended Geoff Zadon’s life. Walker had pinned both murders on innocent men. He was the one Eames really wanted, and since Roger was willing to talk, she didn’t need to level charges in exchange for a deal.

The day after Eames recorded Roger’s statement, he was admitted to the hospital. Before he went, he asked his brother to take him for a slice of pizza: he knew he probably had less than a week left, and all he wanted was one more slice of pizza before he faced whatever awaited him. That’s what he told Barba when he called him from the pizza place. “I love you, Raf,” he’d said. “You’ll be a judge someday, I know it. I’m sorry I didn’t do the right thing years ago.”

At Roger’s wake, Barba learned that all the Deimants, including Roger’s parents, knew exactly who he was. 

He went home alone that night, and on the night after the funeral, too. Both times he thought about calling Benson, but in honor of Roger’s memory, in honor of what they had together, what they should have had together, that didn’t seem right.

_You’ll be a judge someday._ The number of living people who believed that was quickly decreasing. It was down to Laura (who he prayed was still alive and safe) and Olivia Benson. Only two.

Barba didn’t believe it himself. Neither did Lucia, who he hadn’t spoken to since his trial started. 

Lucia hadn’t even called to offer her condolences about Roger. Maybe she thought Roger’s involvement in the cover-up of Mira’s murder meant that her own son was involved too, that he was corrupt, rotten, even worse than the sort of person who would dare flip a switch that he had no legal right or reason to flip. 

His work took him to the 16th Precinct the morning after Roger’s funeral, so naturally, he stopped in to see Benson. In her office, with the door closed and the blinds drawn, she hugged him, and he broke down. He hadn’t meant to break down. He hadn’t expected to.

“Shh,” Benson said, cradling the back of his head, “I’m here.”

“This is burdening you,” he lamented into her shoulder. “Roger helped cover up your friend’s murder, and here I am crying to you about him.”

“Rafa, look at me.”

His eyes stung.

“If you were burdening me,” she said, “I’d tell you. If you were saying something hurtful, I’d tell you.”

“Would you?”

“Do you remember what I said to you when you left? That was me telling you that you were hurting me, that you were breaking my heart.”

He kissed her lips.

“I shouldn’t do that here,” he said.

“Today’s an exception.”

“Sure.” Another kiss, a longer, more lingering one. “You have time for a drink tonight?”

“Yes.”

He smiled. “Liv,” he said, pulling her closer still, the palms of his hands now resting on her hips, “do you realize this is the first time you agreed to have a drink with me after work?”

“We used to have drinks after work all the time.”

“But whenever I asked, you said no.”

“I was worried about … impropriety.”

“I was never improprietous.” His lips were on her neck, under her jawline, his tongue flicking lightly across her skin, all gestures of _I’ll show you improprietous_ , and when he looked up, she was grinning. “If I was improprietous,” he said, both lips now pressed to her ear, “I’d ask if I could touch you.” He lifted her shirt very slightly and ran his fingers across the waistline of her pants. 

“How about after we get that drink, I take you home with me?”

“Yes, please.” He kissed her lips again. “Liv, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I know.” 

“I was thinking we should go — if you don’t like this idea, I understand —”

“To your old bar in Brooklyn?”

“How’d you know?” 

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“You were.” His face lit up with surprise. “I remembered you. Not because —”

“You and Roger would have still been together if he hadn’t —”

“If he hadn’t wanted to protect me from the shit he found himself caught in. That’s the nicest way I can think of to put it.”

“At our age, we’re bound to have pasts,” Benson assured him, “and it’s okay to talk about people you loved on the terms you loved them.”

“But he was involved with some of the worst people in this city.”

“On the terms you loved them.”

“I’ll meet you at 6?”

“Yes.”

—-

They sat together in a semicircular booth in the bar in Brooklyn where they’d first met in 1999 — maybe the same booth he’d been working in that night she’d approached him, maybe not, she couldn’t remember, neither could he — with two glasses of Cabernet. She’d sidled in next to him, just like she had on that night 19 years ago, but tonight, there was no space between them. She rested her head on his shoulder. Staring forward, he wrapped both arms around her.

“Rafa,” she said, “have you spoken to your mother?”

“Liv!”

“You mentioned when you first came back that you hadn’t spoken to her since the trial. I was —”

“Sticking your nose” — here he kissed the tip of her nose — “in what’s between me and my mother.”

“You left without telling her where you were going.”

“She told me I’d thrown everything away for a family I had no connection to. She said I was an idiot who deserved whatever consequences I faced.”

“You must have been furious.”

“No. She was right.”

“How can you say —”

“Plain and simple, she was right. I let her down. I spit on my grandmother’s memory, on what she worked for, on all her hopes for me. Look at what I did. Look, objectively. She’s not wrong.”

Benson slid an arm behind his back, rubbing wide circles over his shirt, across his suspenders. “In my eyes, she’s wrong.”

“Objectively, though.”

“She’s so, so wrong.” She placed her other hand on his cheek. “That’s why I was mad at you for leaving. You’re better than that. You’re a good man. You’re a great prosecutor.”

“Liv, I’m all right. I’ve pulled it together. You don’t have to flatter me.”

“You should apply for a job with the Attorney General.”

“They could send me to Buffalo.”

“Find out if you’re still on the list to become a family court judge.”

“I’m not.”

“Do you know that?”

“It’s over, Liv.”

“You weren’t convicted, though.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Benson nodded and moved closer again so she could kiss his cheek. 

He hadn’t been convicted, but he had been censured twice by the bar association, both times for interfering personally in the affairs of witnesses and defendants. A judicial appointment would have to be cleared by the state senate. Half of the state senate, at least half, had adored Alex Muñoz, who was now serving prison time on account of the corruption that Barba had exposed.

He knew his fate. He’d already asked around.

“You should fight,” she said.

“For what?”

“Your career.”

Barba let out a puff of air, a half-hearted laugh, and swallowed the rest of his wine. “As Jack McCoy, himself likes to say, I’m too old to play Hamlet.” He raised his empty glass to nothing in particular.

“Let’s get out of here?” she prompted.

Barba grinned. “That,” he said, is a conversation I’d like to have.”

—

Daniel Zadon and Paul Margolis were twins, Will’s son. When telling Benson about her secret past, Mira had always said “the lawyer’s wife” when referring to the 16-year-old he’d hooked up with after she broke their relationship off. Back in the 70s, most states would have allowed a 30-something man to marry a 15- or 16-year-old girl as long as they had her parents’ permission. Laying in bed early Friday morning while Barba showered, Benson sleepily — she’d only had two hours of sleep, but wasn’t complaining — wondered if “the lawyer’s wife” was Will’s current wife, Cordelia.

She sent Eames a text explaining her early morning theory.

_I need to bring her in for questioning on husband & son_, Eames texted back minutes later. _Want to come down and help? We need to get DZ back for you._

_Sure_ , she wrote back, _let me know when you’ve got her._

Barba came out of the shower. Benson rubbed her eyes. “I’ve got to get Noah ready for school,” she said.

“Is he going to ask why I’m here?”

“Tucker used to stay here all the time.”

Barba feigned a stab to the heart.

“I mean he’ll get that you’re my … significant other.”

Barba sat on the bed, leaned in close, and kissed her. “You’re clean, I still need a shower,” she complained. “I really need a shower.”

“You’re welcome.”

She let out a sputtering laugh and lifted the covers, the nightshirt she’d thrown on at three in the morning riding up precariously close to her hips. Barba feigned passing out, collapsing on the bed. She straddled him and, squeezing his towel-covered legs between hers, warned him that he was going to have to go to work in a very uncomfortable state if he didn’t let her shower. 

“I could stay like this all day,” he protested. 

“I’ve got a kid. I can’t stay like this all day.”

She slid off the opposite end of the bed and started for the bathroom. “I love you,” he called after her.

“I love you,” she said softly, “always.”


	9. Honorable

Late in the afternoon, Eames called Benson to tell her that Cordelia and her lawyer were coming down to 1PP. She asked Lucy — worth her weight in gold, or the half of Benson’s paycheck that went to her — to stay late.

Cordelia was 56, almost 57. She was exactly the right age to have been Daniel and Paul’s mother, but she’d likely never claimed either man as her own child because Daniel was supposed to be her nephew, for the purpose of Will’s extortion scheme.

When Benson opened the door to the interview room at 1PP, she swallowed the hard lump that formed in her throat when she saw that Cordelia’s lawyer was Randy Dworkin. “We know you killed Will,” Eames was saying. Benson hung back in the corner with her arms folded across her chest.

Dworkin looked up at her. She could have sworn she saw a flash of sympathy in his eyes. He adjusted his sport coat and looked back down at his notes. 

“What’s your evidence for that, Captain?” Dworkin asked.

“Were you tired of having to cover up for a four-decade-long extortion scheme?” Benson said, not moving from her spot in the corner. “Or were you tired of having to cover up more than two decades of your son’s — oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, your nephew’s — sexual assaults?”

“What the hell is this lady talking about?” Cordelia demanded.

“Lieutenant Benson and I know that Daniel is Will’s son,” Eames told her, “and now that everything about Mira Margolis’s murder is out in the open —”

“Ha, you think everything about that murder is out in the open.”

“On behalf of my client,” Dworkin said, strategically interrupting her, “I’m not sure I like how that series of DNA tests proceeded, and I’m not sure that Lieutenant Benson should be in the room either.”

“Daniel Zadon has nothing to do with the Margolis murder,” Eames said, “and his crimes are Manhattan SVU’s jurisdiction.”

“Enough of this,” Cordelia said. “What Will and I did in the 1970s is none of your business.”

“Counselor, you might want to let your client know she’s implicating herself.”

“It’s none of your business!” Cordelia barked. “Stay away from my family. Leave us alone.”

Eames stood up and moved in closer. “Who killed your husband?”

“None. Of. Your. Business.”

“This is about a murder. It’s my business.”

“Yeah, well, that’s your opinion.”

“It’s my job.” Eames pressed her palms flat against the table. “Who killed Will?”

“What do you care?” Cordelia said. “You didn’t even like Will. You think he’s a criminal.”

“His scheme set in motion two murders, one of which was your own son Geoff.”

“Screw you. I’m not covering anymore.”

“For Will?” Benson asked.

“No, for Joseph. His only loyalty lately was to that garbage lawyer-lady who wouldn’t get out of our family. You would have thought what happened to Geoff was a good enough sign she should stay away.”

“Laura Perez?” Benson asked breathlessly.

“One thing at a time,” Eames said. “Who killed Will?”

“Joseph!” Cordelia said, her voice echoing off the windowless walls.

“Cordelia, slow down,” Dworkin said. “Let me talk.”

“No, no, no, they go after Will and Daniel and say nothing about Joseph, the goddamn traitor.”

Dworkin shook his head. “She tells you who killed Will, you won’t press charges against her?”

“No charges with regards to Will,” Eames said. She looked over at Benson. Clearly, they both had enough experience in interrogation to know what was coming next. 

“Let me talk,” Cordelia insisted.

“If you do,” Dworkin said, “it’s against my advice.”

Benson sat with them at the table. “Let her talk.”

“Joseph was a traitor to our family. What Will and I did in the 70s was our business, nobody else’s.”

Maybe, Benson thought, Cordelia — who couldn’t for the life of her distinguish between a victimless crime and a victim-full crime — believed at 16 that she was in a whirlwind romance with an older man. Maybe when Will took advantage of Cordelia’s unintended pregnancy and his sister’s rape to extort a mobster, the young Cordelia realized she was already in too deep. After seven children, one who committed several sexual assaults, some against his own sisters, one kidnapped by a woman targeted by middle-management mafia, one murdered in service of protecting family secrets, she could see no way out. She might have believed, on account of her decision to stay with Will years ago, that she now had no choice but to defend him. She’d spent so much time defending him that she knew no other way, even though Will had been dead for two months. But maybe, Benson warned herself, maybe that was too generous a read on the situation.

“Joseph got mad at Will and punched him. Knocked him out, then kicked him in the stomach while he was down. He died right there. Friend of his, I think, helped him dump the body at the ferry dock.”

“Sounds like Joseph was filled with rage,” Eames said. “That sort of homicide — kicking, punching somebody to death — that’s textbook rage. So what was Joseph so mad about?”

“Not part of your agreement,” Dworkin said. “We are free to —”

“I killed Joseph,” Cordelia interrupted, and Benson couldn’t help the bit of schadenfreud-ish delight that spring up in her on seeing Dworkin’s exasperation. Of course that made little sense, given that he’d successfully defended Barba in court, successfully convinced the jury that Barba was not guilty of murder, but still.

She was mad at Dworkin for being in that interview room, from having the audacity to remind her, merely by his presence, of the trial that Barba had been put through.

Surely that was more her problem than his. But still. He was exasperated, and she was more than a little delighted about that.

“Right through the forehead,” Cordelia continued. “This way they’d think it was related to what happened with Geoff. And you know what? It was. The stupid girl in Miami. I hope they killed her, I hope her body floated out to sea.”

“Why did Joseph kill Will, and where the hell is Daniel?” Benson demanded.

“That’s enough,” Dworkin said. He turned to Cordelia. “If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in prison, stop talking now.”

Eames placed Cordelia under arrest for Joseph’s murder. Dworkin insisted that they go directly to arraignment court.

“My god,” Benson said as they regrouped in Eames’ office afterwards, “Cordelia confessed to killing Joseph to protect who — Daniel? Will?”

“She’s telling the truth,” Eames said. “She killed him. I’m convinced of that already. You saw Dworkin’s face.”

“He’s going to try for an extreme emotional disturbance plea.”

Eames placed a hand over her own heart. “Aww.”

“Aww? That’s an odd reaction to —”

“The lawyer talk.”

“As Cordelia would say —”

“None of my business. Right.” Eames tried to mask a smirk with a look of intense concentration. “So anyway, with respect to your case, whatever made Joseph angry enough to kill Will is probably the key to finding Daniel.”

Benson sighed shallowly. 

“What?” Eames asked.

“In that mess of a family, what would finally make Joseph angry enough to kill Will, after so many years?”

“Huh,” Eames said, realizing. “You think Will had Laura killed?”

Benson closed her eyes. “I’d better be wrong.”

——

On the same Friday evening that Benson spent working late with the joint task force at 1PP, Barba found himself unexpectedly having dinner with Jack McCoy at a restaurant frequented by judges and upper-level employees of the Manhattan DA.

McCoy had called Barba earlier that day, joking that he needed a defense attorney — a grandfatherly joke that neither landed not constituted much of an apology — and asked if they could meet for dinner. “The governor and I have not been on good terms since your trial,” McCoy had said, “and if you are open, I would like for us to meet and discuss a few … related … matters.”

“I don’t know if that’s advisable,” Barba said.

“The mayor and governor haven’t agreed on anything in four years. They both think I made a grave error in judgment in charging you with murder.”

That the mayor and governor agreed on anything was indeed monumental, so Barba agreed to meet McCoy for dinner.

“What’s going on, Jack?” Barba asked after they’d ordered dinner and were done with formalities.

“You’re missed around the office.”

“You’re the one who replaced me with the man you hired to prosecute me. How’s that working out for you?”

“I’ll leave that assessment up to Lieutenant Benson.”

“Don’t bring Liv into this, please. What’s going on?”

“The state bar association contacted me about you.”

“Ah, wonderful.” Barba popped a piece of chicken into his mouth to stop himself from saying what he really wanted to say.

“Are you still interested in a judicial appointment?” McCoy asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not. I’m asking.”

“A state judicial appointment?”

“Family court,” McCoy said, “what you applied for. There’s a judge in Westchester retiring at the end of this year.”

“And this has what to do with you, a city official?”

“The governor thinks I should be censured for charging you with and trying you for murder.”

“You always go right for murder. You’re Hang ‘Em High McCoy. It’s what you do.” Barba swallowed his scotch, wincing as it went down. “You’re famous in this city for that reason.” He let the burning liquor remind him not to tell McCoy what else he was famous for in New York City: sleeping with his first four assistants, disregarding conflicts of interest no matter how many times they got him in trouble.

“Your application from three years ago landed on the governor’s desk. He says I dealt you a bad hand and so did the local papers.”

“Do you even know what — Jack, I had my apartment on the market, was preparing my finances as if I was going to prison — do you know what that’s like? Until that jury foreperson said the words “not guilty,” the possibility of three to five years was very, very real. I pissed off the COs union so badly with the Munson case that if I went to jail, I could have been killed while the guards did nothing. Do you know the terror I felt until I heard the verdict? You don’t.”

“I’m not seeking re-election,” McCoy said.

“Well, then,” Barba couldn’t help saying, “good for you.”

“I told Arthur Branch I wasn’t cut out for this office. I was right.”

“That’s fine, because I’m clearly not cut out to be a judge.” He raised his glass. “To shooting yourself in the foot.”

“Here here,” McCoy said, raising his own glass, “but Rafael, I recommended you to the governor with flying colors and admitted I was in the wrong.”

“Also well and good, but —”

“You’re going to get a phone call on Monday from the governor’s office. I’m giving you advance warning because approval will involve —”

“The state senate.” Barba raised his glass again. “There’s the rub.”

“You don’t believe they’ll clear you?”

“What do you think?”

“Would you prosecute a case with a ten percent shot at success?” McCoy asked.

“Today?”

“You did a few months ago.”

“Optimum,” Barba said, looking down at his plate.

“Yes. So it’s worth a shot.”

“Not if they’re going to make me relive what I went through on the stand in February. I can’t take telling that story in front of a skeptical audience again, I can’t relive that. I see that courtroom, that witness stand, in full focus before I fall asleep at night, almost every night. Do you understand?”

McCoy nodded.

“Thank you for the advance warning, though, Jack.”

—

Barba returned to Benson’s apartment later that night. By the time he arrived, Noah was already in bed, and Benson looked drowsy herself after what must have been a long day. When he hugged her, he noticed that she was holding him tighter than usual. “Everything okay?” he asked, knowing it wasn’t.

“Let’s go to bed,” she suggested.

He shrugged off his suit jacket and followed her to the bedroom. She crawled under the covers and waited for him to disassemble his suit and lay each component, neatly folded, on top of the dresser. 

“Come here,” he said, drawing her into his embrace when he joined her in bed. “What happened?”

“I was at 1PP today for the interview with Cordelia Zadon. It’s a federal case, so I can’t disclose anything else, but Randy Dworkin is her attorney. I guess seeing him there —”

“Dworkin’s not mobbed up like Zadon was. I got to know the guy pretty well during my trial.”

“I assume that’s why she hired him, because he’s not part of what Will was part of.”

“Nobody likes to be reminded of my murder trial,” Barba said.

“No.” She turned her head to look at him, to kiss his lips. “There’s something else, but like I said, there’s very little I can disclose.”

Barba closed his eyes, a dull ache forming behind them. “No,” he said, a shaky sense of fright rising up from his stomach, “no, please, no.” His last _no_ was a voiceless whisper. “Did Will have Laura killed?”

“A few things Cordelia said — this is off-the-record, fake-hypothetical like you say — there were a few things she said that led us to believe that. But we don’t know. That’s the truth. Until we find her, we don’t know what happened.”

“You learn early on as a prosecutor to be careful how you talk about fairness,” Barba said, “but this, whatever happened to Laura, is fucking _unfair_. Laura never hurt anyone. The only mistake she ever made was staying in that family. She was so angry, had every right to be, and she’s the last person who deserves this.”

“Keep up hope. We don’t know for sure, and Cordelia might have been messing with us. Okay? Keep up hope that she’s alive and safe.”

Fear for his friend, one of the few people he’d confided in when he was in Miami, crept into his heart.

“Hey,” Benson said, running her fingers through his hair, “what happened with McCoy tonight?”

“You always want to talk about everything.”

“I do,” she said, “because when you don't, you wind up flipping a switch on someone else’s dying infant and skipping town.”

He pursed his lips. “Really?”

“It’s my fault too. I never should have called you that night.”

“Can we move forward now, please?”

“We should, right?”

“Right.”

“I take it McCoy didn’t offer you your old job back.”

“I never would have taken it back anyway.”

“Because he charged you with murder?”

“No. Because of you.” He kissed her and she rolled on top of him, straddling his waist while otherwise pressed flush against him. “Because if I had my old job back, we might not be able to do this.” Instinctively, he thrust his hips upward. He met her smile with his own.

“Don’t change the subject,” she teased as he started to slide his hands up her shirt, his fingertips awaiting the curve of her breasts.

“I think you’ll approve of this particular change of subject,” he promised. 

“You think very highly of yourself.”

“Well,” he said, “in that regard, yes.”

—

At two in the morning, he woke up on his side, his arms wound around her. She was pushing her feet against him. “Move,” she said, still half asleep. “Move. You’re so warm.”

“I love you,” he whispered, rolling onto his back.

She turned on her side. “I like this,” she said, splaying a hand across his chest, “you — here — at night. But you’re so warm.”

He stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. “McCoy was giving me advance warning that I’m up for an appointment to a family court bench.”

“Wait. That’s a good thing, a great thing, isn’t it?”

“Not quite.”

“This is the kind of thing that gets celebrated with wine and cake.”

“Liv.”

“Noah sees every celebration as a way to scam cake out of me.” She turned a little more and moved her hand to his face, teasing his jawline with her fingertips. “You two are a lot alike in that respect, in the way you look at cake.”

“Can we have cake regardless?”

“Yes. And I understand. You don’t want to answer the same questions you were asked during your trial.”

“I don’t,” he admitted. “I can’t.”

“After Lewis —”

“That was much more severe than this.”

“I’m saying, after Lewis, I had to keep retelling the story in more and more detail in different venues, and every time I did, I was shaking inside, and it hurt. I did it, though. Had to clear my own name with IAB and had to get justice for his victims.”

_More and more detail_ reminded him of Laura, of the 900-day headache she’d told him about when he was in Miami, when she’d confided in him.

If Laura could do it for the sake of justice, and if Benson could do it for the sake of justice, surely he could too.

—

To celebrate his return to the field after more than a month on desk duty, Carisi brought breakfast cannoli into the squadroom on Monday morning. (“Breakfast cannoli” meant a large box of regular cannoli from a bakery in Bensonhurst that made them fresh every day at 5AM.) “You’re sure you’re over that concussion?” Rollins joked.

“Same ingredients as those “ricotta” pancakes you get at brunch.” He pronounced _ricotta_ with a sarcastic Midwestern lilt.

“Don’t let him fall on his face,” Benson told Rollins.

“He’s in good shape. This much enthusiasm about pastries is his baseline.”

Fin tilted his head toward the door, where a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with long dark hair pulled into a ponytail and an oversized pocketbook slung over her shoulder, was walking into the squadroom.

“Breakfast cannoli,” she said, looking at the open box on the desk, a friendly demeanor barely concealing the tremor in her voice and hands.

Carisi stood proudly behind the box. “Thank you for understanding, Ma’am.”

“Dara.” She reached out to shake Carisi’s hand, and Carisi nodded knowingly at Benson. “And you must be Lieutenant Benson.”

“Come on,” Benson said, “we’ll talk in my office.”

Benson hoped that Dara was coming to SVU rather than Eames’s joint task force because she knew where Daniel was. Dara’s two younger sisters were still working with Dworkin on posting bail for Cordelia. Dara, a physician’s assistant who lived and worked in Miami, must have flown in last night or on a red-eye early that morning.

Dara sat opposite Benson’s desk, and Carisi followed, handing her a styrofoam coffee cup along with two cannoli wrapped in a napkin. “Thank you,” she said, surprised by the gesture, “I don’t think I’ve eaten in a day and a half.”

Carisi sat next to Dara. “I’m not defending her,” she said, “but you know my mom’s been wrapped up in that world since she was sixteen.”

“I understand,” Benson said. “But everything except Daniel’s assaults at the day school is in the hands of the feds. Do you have information for us about Daniel?”

“I didn’t want to go back to the feds,” Dara said. “You guys know Geoff was killed because if Daniel was charged for what he did to me — my sisters, actually, I was already too old for the statute of limitations — it would have drawn attention to my dad, and exposed the extortion scam and the other murder, right?”

“Yes,” Benson said, “we know that. We know it wasn’t just that he wanted to protect Daniel for the sake of protecting Daniel.”

“Priorities,” Dara said, rolling her eyes. “But that’s why I came to you. The feds are involved because they want those mob guys, and the detective who killed the lady who kidnapped my brother.”

“And what you want,” Benson guessed, “what you need, is justice for you and your sisters.”

Dara closed her eyes. “Yes. Molly’s therapist — don’t tell anyone she’s seeing a therapist, we’re all over 21 now, but our parents were furious that we chose to go to therapy, they’d forbidden it when we were teenagers under their health insurance — said that Lieutenant Benson is the one you go to in this city, the only one who’s consistently reliable.” She turned to Carisi. “No offense.”

“None taken. It’s true.”

“Thank you for the cannoli, though.”

“Anytime.”

“You’ll need to share this with Captain Eames, I know,” Dara said, “but please, please, however big and crazy and awful this gets, please don’t forget me and my sisters.”

“We won’t,” Benson promised.

“I don’t know the whole story,” she said, “but what I do know, from the last time I spoke to Joseph —” She stopped abruptly, caught on her late brother’s name. “The last time I spoke to him, he was afraid for Laura, his ex-wife. He said our dad or somebody associated with him might have put a hit out on her.”

“Your mother already told us. The joint task force is looking into her story.”

“I’m worried about Laura. We grew up with this, me and Hallie and Molly. She didn’t. She’s a few years older than me, and I saw over ten, twelve years, how it broke her.”

“I’m sorry,” Benson said.

Carisi slumped in his chair. “Your corroborating statements will help a lot, though,” he said. “Was Laura going to talk about Daniel? Is that why your dad wanted to out a hit out on her after so many years? It’s all out in the open now, what happened with Lieutenant Margolis.”

“This isn’t about her, or even Daniel, I don’t think,” Dara said. “What did my mom tell you?”

“Tell us what you know,” Benson insisted.

“Joseph told me that Dad was mad at Laura because she took on Amy Rankin’s case, which I didn’t think had anything to do with us. He said he was going to “take care” of Laura because of Amy. I didn’t understand it myself.”

“I doubt anybody would have told Amy who her half-brother really was.”

“She, her dad, and Paul lived together in Miami for a while, more than ten years, I think. But Joseph and I were convinced that Laura knew about nothing other than the sexual assaults. From her point of view, something awful was going on, but not at the level, the scope, she thought. It was just chance that she was one of the attorneys on Amy’s case.”

“Paul and Daniel look a lot alike. Did they ever meet?”

“You were working Daniel’s case, and you knew Paul,” Dara said. “Did you make the connection beforehand?”

“No,” Benson admitted.

“People look alike. People have doppelgangers they’re not in any way related to. If nobody pointed it out to Laura, she might not have noticed. And last year, a few months ago, even, she couldn’t have possibly known there was a connection.”

“Right.”

“So I don’t know. Joseph tried to explain all of this to our dad. He wasn’t having any of it. The idea that anyone in our family would side with Laura, take her part in an argument, was outrageous to my parents. Joseph told me everything. He told me he killed Dad and didn’t expect to live much longer himself. I was worried he was going to point a gun at his own head or something, and as a physician assistant I’m a mandated reporter, but I eventually realized he meant someone was probably going to kill him in retaliation.” Her voice was shaking. “I wanted to find out more about the hit on Laura, if it was still out, if I could stop it, but I’m a coward.”

“No,” Carisi said, “you’re not. You’re a PA, not a detective. You keep yourself safe for your patients and your sisters, all right?”

Dara nodded, sniffing back tears. They asked her a few more questions, corroborating Cordelia’s story, and sent her on her way with Benson’s card in her pocket. When Carisi escorted Dara out, Benson sank back into her office chair, covering her forehead with her hand.

She was going to have to call Eames.

Will — mistakenly? — Believed that Laura knew about his original crime because she was, by chance, representing Mira Margolis’s husband’s daughter.

Benson needed to find out whether Neil Tiposi, who she and Mira’s sister knew as Mira’s “idiot husband,” had ever really had a grandmother in Miami.


	10. Episodic

On the day she was held hostage in a penthouse on the Upper East Side, Benson was safe and back in her office by 4 in the afternoon, but by the time she’d reported back to Dodds, and spoken to an IAB officer, and convinced her squad that Lourdes’s story was worth looking into, and left a message for Dr. Lindstrom, and checked in on Montero, ten o’clock was long gone. Lucy had texted her to let her know that Barba had brought them dinner, and to ask if it was all right if she went home for the night.

Benson hoped that Noah was asleep, and that Barba hadn’t told him too much about where she’d been that day. Her eye sockets and jaw joints ached; her heart had finally stopped racing, but each breath she drew in felt cold in her nose and throat. Her skin was cold too, chilled with evaporated sweat and tears. At least, at the very least, the nightmares wouldn’t start up again for two or three days.

When she saw Barba on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad, the image of 28-year-old Rafael Barba on a cold night in late fall long ago — left hand balled up in a fist, a cigarette balanced between the index and middle fingers of his trembling right hand, clunky mobile phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, eyes red — sprung to mind. She didn’t know why.

He stood, dropped the legal pad onto the coffee table, and walked over to her in a few long strides. He whispered “Liv, sweetheart,” and hugged her as if he didn’t mind that she smelled like sweat, tears and horror. Maybe he didn’t mind at all, she wondered as he ran his fingers through her hair, across her scalp.

She loved him.

But she wished she’d found him that winter night, December 2000, just after Serena died, when she went to his bar telling herself that she wasn’t really looking for him. He and Roger Deimant were over by then. She and Barba could have brought their pasts together and solved Mira’s murder seventeen years ago, if only he’d been there that night. Paul Margolis would have been out of jail in a matter of months rather than having to serve his full sentence. Geoff Zadon would still be alive, Will’s scheme exposed, his daughters able to leverage justice for themselves. 

She and Barba would be married by now, she imagined, married for over a decade. Noah would will have come into their lives, she was sure of that. (When she’d looked into the possibility of insemination years ago, incidental to a case, she’d learned she had a condition that made her unlikely to retain a pregnancy.) Noah was always meant to be hers, and that was the one and only way fate had ever done her right, because fate was always looking out for Noah, who’d been dealt a bad hand at the start of his life.

William Lewis would not have happened.

The scars, the nightmares, the fear and exhaustion he’d left her with, that surely could not have been fate. Fate wasn’t that unjust.

“Liv,” Barba said gently.

“I’ll be all right. I called Lindstrom, left a message with his office. I’m taking tomorrow off, but I have to go back after this, because I know this woman is telling the truth, Rafa, I know it.”

“Come here.” He hugged her tighter. “You want me to stay home with you tomorrow? I don’t have to be in court. I can work from here.”

She shook her head. “I want to see if Dr. Lindstrom can squeeze me in tomorrow, see what I can do to keep this from getting bad.” She pressed her forehead into his shoulder, and then looked up again. “I need to take a shower.”

“Go ahead. I’ll wait for you.”

In the shower, she cried silent, hot tears that matched the temperature of the water rinsing the day’s horrors from the surface of her skin.

She wished he’d been in his bar on that night seventeen and a half years ago. At the very least, she wished they could go back to January.

She pulled on the tank top and pajama pants she’d left hanging on the bathroom door that morning, before she’d known what the day would hold.

Barba was in bed, waiting for her. 

She climbed under the covers and into his arms. For all the missed opportunities, all the heartbreak, all the lost days, weeks, months from the fallout after the Householder case and Barba’s trial, this, for now, was enough.

— 

On a Friday afternoon in late May, Rita Calhoun walked into Barba’s office and shut the door behind her. “Go to the NY1 website. Your replacement fucked up. And then go check in with your girlfriend.”

Barba raised an eyebrow. His heart jumped into his throat when he saw the news on the front page of the website. The entire senior squad at SVU had been involved in a shootout with a drug cartel as the result of what should have been a federal investigation. Stone had refused to yield jurisdiction even when his sister’s life was threatened. His decisions weren’t about refusing to give into terroristic threats either, because an international drug cartel was federal jurisdiction, end of story. Stone’s unwarranted stubbornness had caused horrific collateral damage: three workers at an upstate facility where his sister was hospitalized, three police officers who’d responded to the scene, and Stone’s sister Pamela herself.

“Asshole,” Rita said, folding her arms and rolling her eyes.

“I had threats leveled against me when we went up against the COs union, but that was our own jurisdiction and no one was threatening my mother.”

“Call your girlfriend,” Rita repeated.

“My girlfriend.” He let out a puff of air through narrowed lips. “I’ll see her later, She has a lot on her plate today, I’m sure.”

“Marry her.”

“Rita, don’t overstep.”

“Team Rafioli,” she said. “The greatest ship there ever was.”

“I told Laura” — he stopped short of crossing himself at the mention of his friend’s name, a reflexive prayer that she was alive and safely hidden from the hit that Will had likely put out on her before his death — “ _Barson_ seemed like a better ship name.”

“Listen, we’re all hoping Laura will get back safe. So we’ll stick with Rafioli for now. Call Liv.”

Rita had her fingers on the door handle when Barba said, “Rita, how do you know about the name Rafioli?”

“What?”

“Rafioli was an inside joke between me and Laura. The only person I told about it is Liv.”

Rita shrugged. “Must have heard it from Laura before I left Miami, then.”

“Did you see Laura again before you left Miami?”

“I must have.” She left quickly, slamming his office door behind her.

Santiago Garcia had been in New York three weeks ago to visit Eddie and some other relatives; when he’d gone out with his cousin and Barba one night, he brought up the possibility that Laura had gone into hiding when she learned there was a hit taken out on her. The feds knew that she still had an aunt and uncle in Mexico City, but had been unable to locate her there. 

Barba wondered if Rita knew where Laura was. She would never let him worry like that, unless, of course, her keeping what she knew quiet was integral to Laura’s safety. 

His phone chimed with a text message from Benson: _I’m ok, so’s the squad. A few things to take care of tonight. Can you relieve Lucy? I’ll be home by 9._

His reply: _Of course._

_Thank you_ , she wrote. _I don’t mean to put you out like this. I don’t mean to use you as a babysitter._

_I love you_ , he answered, wanting to add “you’re not using me as a babysitter. We’re family.”

“We’re family” had been true for years, but it seemed to soon, the wrong time to say or write it.

He hadn’t spoken to Lucia in almost four months. The last time was when he told her he was transferring his savings into her account in case he went to prison, and that she needed to sign off on the transfer. “Fine,” she’d said flatly.

She’d shut down so he couldn’t break her heart any more than he’d already broken it. He recognized that instinct. He was sure Olivia did too.

When Benson returned home at 9:30, he moved to embrace her but she stepped away. Her eyes were all anger and exhaustion.

“Why did you have to leave?” she demanded. 

His heart skipped a beat. “I thought you were —”

“You left the DA’s office, you left me with _him_ , I just watched a woman die because her own brother wouldn’t let a case go to the feds.” She hung her head. “This is the sort of thing that Mira hated. It’s why she had to leave SVU, but she saw it in homicide too, and it broke her heart every time.”

“What’s that?” he asked, moving one step closer to her.

She went over to the kitchen counter, where she dropped her keys and her purse. “Misplaced priorities. Forgetting, or purposefully forgetting, what you’re supposed to prioritize.”

“I love you,” he promised.

She didn’t return the sentiment until after she’d showered off the residue of yet another hideous day. He was waiting for her in the bedroom, standing awkwardly by the window in his sleeveless undershirt and checkered boxers. Finally, she hugged him. “I love you. Always. I’m sorry for what I said before about you leaving.”

“Don’t apologize. You’re probably right.”

“Rafa, I’m not.”

He kissed her gently, sweetly. “What can I do to fix it?”

“Right now? You can help me forget until morning, when I’ll be the one left to deal with the fallout.”

He kissed a path down her neck, to her shoulder, down her breasts, backing her up towards the wall. Lifting his head, he ground his erection against her, sliding his hands up her T-shirt so he could tease her nipples with his fingers. She lifted a leg and he heard a soft _crack_ , followed by laughter in Benson’s throat, a smile spreading across her face.

“What?” he said, pressing his nose to hers, unable to suppress returning her smile with one of his own.

“If we’re going to do this, we’ll have to move to the bed. You can bend me over the side of the bed like the other night.”

“That was nice,” he said, drawing out the last word. 

“Yeah?” 

“You said things I never heard you say before. I don’t know if my knees can handle that again so soon, though.”

“Look at us, middle aged with sad knees. Have I killed the mood yet?”

“No,” he said through gritted teeth, his nose and lips on her neck, “I like that we make each other weak in the knees.” He hooked his fingers into the waistline of her pajama pants and worked his way back down her body, bending his own knees in the process.

“Baby, if you that, I’m still going to have to lift my leg. Otherwise you might suffocate.”

He stood back up. “Did you just call me baby?”

“Barba, baby,” she teased.

“Listen, if it’s my time to go, that’s how I want to go.”

“Drowning in my —”

“Yes.”

She laid down on the bed, and he started to help her out of her pajama pants, kissing her thighs along the way. “I’m not as fun as I used to be,” she admitted.

“Aww, Liv, I’m having lots of fun with you, knees be damned.”

“What am I supposed to do — mmm — hire a personal trainer on my — right there, don’t stop — on my salary, when half my paycheck — ohhh — half of my paycheck is already going to Lucy? It’s not like I — more please — it’s not like I make as much as a famous actor.”

“Liv,” he said, taking a breath, “relax. Enjoy.”

“Yes,” she said, raking her hands through his hair and closing her eyes.


	11. Backstory

“Baconeggandcheese!” Carisi exclaimed, practically slamming his laptop down on the conference table in the corner of the squadroom where Benson sat with Eames and Lisa Abernathy, SVU’s new consulting psychologist.

“I also enjoy breakfast sandwiches, Detective Carisi,” Eames said matter-of-factly.

“All right, all right, forgive my enthusiasm, but I think that Amy Rankin, ‘cause she’s the other body we found at the ferry dock, is connected to whatever happened to Will Zadon, and is our last hope for locating Daniel. Here’s what I —”

“Detective, sit down,” Eames said, pulling out a chair for him. “I’ll tell you what I told your lieutenant just now.”

Sliding the computer across the table, Carisi sat next to Eames. “Amy Rankin is a closed case,” she explained. “Her death was ruled a suicide by the ME. My task force is finished with our side of the case. We got Walker on the Margolis murder, we’ve got him on Geoff Zadon too, we know all about Will’s involvement, and we’ve got Cordelia for the murder of her son Joseph. We’re done.”

“What about Laura Perez?” Benson asked.

“Her disappearance has nothing to do with New York City. If anything related to the federal prosecution of Cal Walker or Cordelia Zadon leads us to Daniel, we’ll tag you in. But if Amy Rankin has anything to do with the Zadons, it’s entirely —”

“Circumstantial,” Benson said. “You also said that about Mira, and you were wrong.”

Eames rubbed her eyes. “I’m going to kick myself for asking, but why did you interrupt our meeting by shouting “Baconeggandcheese!”?”

Carisi smirked and Benson wondered what he was up to. Determined to find Daniel and bring him to justice for the sake of the day school victims and the Zadon sisters, Carisi also believed the fact that Amy was technically Paul Margolis’s sister couldn’t have been random. “Braden Eglund, 27-year-old YouTube star from Miami, goes by the handle Baconeggandcheese,” he said, tapping “play” on the video. 

“I know this guy,” Abernathy said, pointing at the screen. “He promotes 1980s-style “stranger danger” mentality.”

In a sleeveless shirt and stonewashed jeans, hair combed up a few inches higher than was reasonable, this young man who called himself Baconeggandcheese looked like a transplant from the 80s, even though he was born too late for that decade. 

“He makes videos where he pretends to kidnap children,” Carisi said, “to “raise awareness” of stranger danger, is what he calls it. The Internet loves him. My parents and sisters share his stuff on Facebook all the time. This past Easter, I’m sitting at the table, already with a headache since I’m getting over a concussion, right, and they’re singing this guy’s praises, like, what a great thing to do when all the parents are on their cell phones at the playground. I’m telling them, no, trust me, I’m a special victims detective, I know what I’m talking about, this guy’s full of shit.”

“If the parents don’t know,” Eames said, “isn’t a staged kidnapping exactly the same thing as a real kidnapping?”

“Pretty much. I mean, there’s questions about whether what he’s doing is reality reality or reality show reality, but Florida state police hate the guy.”

“On behalf of my parents whose brains won’t let them assess relative risk,” Abernathy said, “I hate this guy.”

“Perps in almost all child kidnappings are non-custodial parents. Baconeggandcheese here scares you out of taking your kids to the playground but says nothing about why all schools need to have a section for custody alerts on their parent contact cards.”

Carisi’s reference to custody disputes briefly reminded Benson of Barba’s family court aspirations. He was scheduled to appear before the state senate in July, right before their summer recess. Benson hoped — in the back of her mind, prayed — that his interference in the Householder case wouldn’t affect the state senate’s decision, but she couldn’t see a way that they could look past his error in judgment. It had never been his place to flip that switch.

“Lieu?” Carisi said.

She blinked a few times. “Right,” she said, having lost track of Carisi’s explanation for how this young man who called himself Baconeggandcheese was connected to Amy Rankin.

“Anyway, here’s the most recent video, a “man-on-the-street” type of thing about some new panic over kidnappings at suburban malls.”

Eames tilted her head and looked at the computer screen. “Human trafficking as interpreted by people who have no idea what human trafficking actually is?”

“Bingo. You know, at least ten of those stories turned out to be people trying to drive traffic to their Instagrams or blogs for money.” Carisi pointed at the screen. “Just watch.”

“He seems much more somber here than in the other video,” Eames observed. Benson and Abernathy nodded in agreement.

Near the end of the video, the screen went blank, a message in small pink font at the center reading “FOR AMY,” with a heart emoji on either side of the phrase. Baconeggandcheese appeared on screen again and promoted a few products, an upcoming video, and the screen went black again, leaving a single heart emoji in the center. The video had been posted a week after Amy’s funeral.

“That’s —“ Eames started to say.

“You want to say coincidence? I cross-checked it with the rumors on one of the fanfiction message boards, and I’m going to try to get in touch with the other attorney on Amy’s team.”

“Not our case, and probably not yours either,” Eames said. “In fact, since Amy’s death was ruled a suicide —”

“On lack of evidence,” Benson reminded her.

“There’s no case at all.”

“Alex,” Benson pleaded.

Eames stood and patted Benson’s shoulder. “I’m trying to keep you from stepping in it with Dodds. We looked into Neil Tiposi because the crowdfunding page rubbed us the wrong way too, and Amy owed more like one million rather than five million in settlements, but it was pretty clear that Neil had done everything in his power to help Amy, and he was open with us.”

“Except about why he was trying to raise five million,’ Carisi said.

“Well.” Eames patted Benson’s shoulder again. “I’ll call you if Daniel turns up.”

“Please do.”

When Eames was gone, Carisi shut his laptop and leaned back in his chair. “Why’s she giving you such a hard time?” he asked Benson. “All these people are obviously connected.”

“They might not be,” Abernathy said. “You only assume they are because of what you’ve already seen, because you already found an unlikely connection between Mira Margolis and Will Zadon.”

“But now that we know they’re connected,” Benson said, “that makes it much more likely that Mira’s husband was also connected to the Zadons. All I want to know is what business Neil really had in Miami when Amy was conceived, but nobody down there will talk to me. They’ve been told to only talk to the feds.”

“I’ll tell you this much,” Abernathy said, opening a file folder in front of her, “Amy fit the profile of a teenage-slash-early-twenties Internet confabulator perfectly until about three years ago. When the lawsuit hit, she had a full-time job with a university admissions office, traveled all over the country for college fairs, and seems to have been in a serious relationship with this Bacon guy, if Carisi’s right. She didn’t fit the profile anymore. She might have been getting treatment.”

“I’m going to call —.” Stone, she realized, would be of little to no help. He’d probably even rat her out to Eames. “I’m going to call someone who can tell me whether doctor-patient privilege —”

“Extends beyond death?” Carisi asked. “It doesn’t.”

“Carisi, I appreciate the help, and I know you went to law school, but you’re a cop, not a lawyer, and this involves both New York and Florida.”

Benson wondered if she’d been a bit flippant in her response when she caught a hint of a wounded look on Carisi’s face.

“Get us started, at least,” Abernathy said. “What do you know that can help?”

“Nah, just, uh — anybody but Stone, right? — some of the folks who work for the Attorney General have offices down here too. If she was seeing a psychiatrist, we won’t be able to get anything out of them anyway. This is outside our jurisdiction, and that’s me talking as a cop.”

—

Amy Rankin’s last two CSI fanfictions were different from the dozens of others she’d posted over five years.

She’d posted the last two within three months of each other, just over a year and a half ago, when she was still in the middle of negotiating her way out of multiple fraud charges, when she was still facing at least ten lawsuits. The more recent fanfictions were posted under a different username, but shared IP addresses with some of Amy’s previous stories and comments, back when she’d posted as power attorney and mother-of-24 Sandra Shibley. A friend in TARU had confirmed to Benson that Amy, or at least someone using her computer, had posted the newer stories.

The earlier stories didn’t center on cases. Most took place in alternate universes, transporting the characters to high school, a fictional island nation, a bakery, a coffeehouse, Florida, and so on. Characters would meet, deal with heady emotional issues, have sex, and by the last few chapters, barely resembled the characters from the television show. Amy’s earlier stories also revealed curiosity and naivete about sex. (“That’s bound to cause at least one UTI,” Benson said out loud one night in bed as Barba slept next to her.) But the last two stories were different: they resembled episodes of the television show, with the CSIs investigating crimes on their home turf in Las Vegas.

A little more sex, a few more feelings than the show, but fairly straightforward stories.

One was about a woman who blows up her husband’s entire extended family in their house at Thanksgiving. She gets no prison time because the family has covered up generations of sexual assault. The plot, although legally and procedurally _wrong_ , implied that Amy knew something about her own lawyer’s connection to the Zadon family. The story read as a revenge fantasy written on Laura’s behalf.

The other story, the last one Amy had written, was about a couple working an extortion scheme on a woman who had rescued a child from a different extortion scheme. 

Neither story had come across Eames’s radar because the federal-city task force had decided to treat Amy as an entirely separate case that belonged with the southernmost precinct in Manhattan. That precinct had accepted the ME’s report.

What had Amy known, and how much of an idiot was Neil Tiposi after all?

Benson must have grumbled out loud, because Barba flipped so that he was facing her. 

He’d stayed over ten nights in a row, ever since the night following the shootout, always making some excuse to sleep over. She didn’t mind. She wouldn’t admit it, but she didn’t mind.

Lindstrom had told her that as long as she was keeping her appointments and working her therapy plan, it was fine if she needed to stay up reading for a few weeks before facing her nightmares head on. For now.

“What are you reading?” Barba’s eyes were still closed when he asked the question. 

“If the light from the tablet’s bothering your eyes, I’ll move to the living room.”

“No.” He sleepily batted at her arm. “Are you reading for pleasure, or are you working?”

“What’s the right answer?”

He opened his eyes.

“By which I mean,” she continued, “the answer that won’t result in sarcastic commentary on your part.”

“Hey.” He sat up and wrapped his arms around her. “You do what you have to do and I’m here whenever you need me.”

“I like you better when you’re sarcastic.” She removed her reading glasses and set them, along with the tablet, on the bedside table.

“Whenever you need me, however you need me, to help you sleep, I’m here.”

“I’d take you up on that offer,” she said, stretching one of her legs across both of his, “but I’ve been reading awful sex scenes for the last 45 minutes.”

“Let me see, let me see,” he said with mock excitement.

She shook her head. Barba feigned disappointment.

“It’s Amy Rankin’s.” She lay down on the pillow, and he joined her so they were facing each other. “I think she knew … a lot.”

“She knew about Mira.”

“In her most recent stories, the cases strongly resemble Laura’s and Mira’s. The one that looks like Mira’s has a double extortion scheme and I wonder — I mean, she probably made it up for the sake of the story, but — I wonder if Neil was extorting someone who knew about Mira and Paul.”

“I thought Neil was an idiot.”

“So did I. But maybe I’m wrong.”

“You’ve been right about a lot lately.”

“And that’s not necessarily a good thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you know how hard it is to be right about beloved people who turn out to be awful?”

“Alex Muñoz, Roger Deimant, probably this Tiposi guy …” 

“I don’t want to think about it.” She inched closer and kissed his lips. He rolled onto his back, and she accepted is invitation to rest her head between his chin and his shoulder.

“Team Rafioli,” she said softly.

She felt him laugh beneath her. “Always.”

Closing her eyes, she wished for darkness. An image of Lourdes pointing a gun at her in the penthouse taunted her drowsy mind. At least in the penthouse there were windows, not like —

The other images were much, much worse. She wanted to will them away.

But, if you tell your brain not to think of a pink elephant because pink elephants will keep you anxious and awake, your brain will output nothing but pink elephants. So, you have to train yourself to live with the pink elephants, pet them, feed them, because you’re stuck with them no matter what. That’s what Benson had learned in the last five years or so.

“Liv,” Barba said, gently stroking her hair.

She kept her eyes closed. “Hm?”

“Is it possible Laura’s alive, hiding from the hit, and doesn’t want to be found?”

“Yes.”

“So there was a hit out on her.”

“Active investigation. Can’t comment. No pillow talk.”

For a few seconds, they were silent. She opened her eyes again and kissed Barba’s jawline. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It doesn’t do either of us, or Laura, or Dara Zadon, any good.”

“Laura was exhausted. She never asked to be in the middle of this. If there was a connection between her client and her ex-husband’s family, she never knew about it.”

“I know.” She stretched her arm over him so that they were now in a full embrace. “This is still too much pillow talk, but, look, Carisi wants to talk to the other lawyers on Amy’s team, see if we can find out if she was seeing a psychologist or psychiatrist. Our consulting psychologist thinks she was being treated.”

“This is way outside your jurisdiction, you know.”

“It may help us find Daniel.”

“The good news is, doctor-patient privilege is more about medical ethics than it is about law — and, yes, I’m the last person who should be talking about medical ethics versus law, but — legally, there’s no doctor-patient privilege on the federal level at all, and it’s fairly weak in New York State, probably Florida too.”

“That’s what Carisi tried to tell me.”

“You should listen to him. He was a good law student. Not every lawyer was a good student.”

“I think I insulted hm. I told him I wanted to talk to a prosecutor first, because he’s a cop, not a lawyer.”

“Ooh.” Barba cringed dramatically. “You owe him some vacation time, or a week’s worth of breakfast. He passed the Bar on the first try. He’s a lawyer. He loves law. It’s almost hilarious how much he loves law.”

“Then why didn’t he —”

“Mike Dodds. And you. And Rollins. And … me.”

“Poor Carisi.”

“Don’t feel too bad for the guy, though,” he said, a long, wistful sigh in his chest.

“What?” She was suddenly wide awake. In response, Barba rolled back over so he was facing the wall. “You’re not getting away with _don’t feel too bad for the guy_ after defending him and then going to sleep.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Good office gossip. That’ll help me sleep.”

“You realize this “good office gossip” is about me.”

“You and Carisi?”

“This isn’t an appropriate discussion so early in our relationship.”

“Early?” she said. “Our relationship is twenty years in the making.”

“This isn’t gossip.” His tone had turned serious.

She kissed his shoulder. “Okay. I get it.”

After a few more seconds of silence, he breathed deep and exhaled shallowly. “It was after Dodds’s funeral. Carisi was mad at himself for not going on the call because he had more experience with domestic violence. My heart was broken because after months of wondering whether a relationship between you and me was appropriate, months of handwringing over whether asking you out on a proper date or kissing you or even hinting at how madly in love with you I was would bring down the entire DA’s office, I found out that you’d been with Tucker for months. I was worried about conflicts of interest and you were secretly sleeping with the head of IAB.”

“And?”

“And the rest is between me and Carisi, and I shouldn’t have told you as much as I did.”

“What you told me will never get back to him. You have my word.”

“You want to try to sleep now?” Barba asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.” He breathed out again. “I shouldn’t have shared that. One more moral strike against me.”

“Why’d you say not to feel too sorry for him, though?”

“Because you weren’t the only one who broke my heart that spring.”


	12. Relative Privation

“He’s where?” Benson demanded, hovering over Rollins’ desk, her voice dripping with exasperation.

Rollins shrugged. “He put in for vacation time weeks ago. It’s summer. He’s on vacation.”

“In Miami, the other city involved in the case he and I are working together.”

“Great beaches?”

“When Fin pulled something like this in Cuba last year, Dodds almost moved me to Personnel.”

“You had nothing to worry about,” Fin said, joining Benson behind Rollins’s chair. “Not like Carisi to go rogue, though.”

“The case is getting to him,” Benson said. “And after what happened with Jules Hunter, and his niece, he wants Daniel found before he can do any more harm.”

“So,” Rollins said, “if he went a little rogue, and I’m sure he didn’t, you’d understand.”

“There’s very, very little I understand right now. I’m going to pretend you never told me that Carisi’s in Miami, but if Dodds comes around asking questions,” she said, pointing fingers at Rollins and Fin, “I’m laying the blame squarely on you.”

“Sure, sell out your sergeant and your senior detective,” Rollins said.

“Starting September, we do everything by the book, inside our jurisdiction.”

“All right, Captain,” Fin said.

Rollins stood so she could follow Benson back to her office. “Captain? What’s that about?”

Behind them, Fin smiled. 

“In March, I took the captain exam,” Benson told her. “I thought that between Noah’s kidnapping and, well, February, I wasn’t going to pass.”

“She got the second highest score in the city,” Fin announced.

“Talk about selling someone out.”

“I’m not selling you out. I’m bragging about our —”

“Fearless leader,” Rollins said.

“Detective, Sergeant, flattery will get you nowhere. And between Carisi sneaking off to Florida and all the procedural screw-ups we’ve managed this year, I doubt I’m getting that promotion.”

“Second highest score,” Fin reminded her. “Dodds’ll look like an asshole if he doesn’t promote you.”

“Lieutenant,” an officer called from the front of the squadroom.

Benson turned around and saw the officer standing near the entrance, accompanied by none other than Lucia Barba, who had an awkward half-smile on her face. She waved Lucia over and invited her into her office.

Before she closed the door, she caught a glance between Fin and Rollins that read “uh-oh.” 

“Mrs. Barba,” she said, pulling out a chair for Lucia, “what brings you here?”

She knew that Barba and his mother hadn’t been on speaking terms since the trial had started.

“I’m not here to ask you what your intentions are with my 48-year-old son. I’m here because I have information that’s been eating me alive the last few months, and so I’ve got to do the right thing.”

Benson sat behind her desk. “About Rafa?”

“About Daniel Zadon, the man from the day school on the Upper West Side.”

Benson’s eyes nearly fell out of her head; she wasn’t sure if she’d ever blink again. “Daniel has been missing for months.”

“That’s why I wasn’t sure if it was relevant that three years ago, I wrote a letter of recommendation on behalf of Daniel.” Lucia swallowed hard and clutched her purse. “And obviously I was distracted by … other matters … when the story was first on the news.”

“You knew Daniel?”

“No,” Lucia said, “I knew Neil Tiposi.”

Indeed, Benson was never going to blink again.

“I had no idea he was married to that lieutenant who got killed years ago. I knew he was a widower, he had a son, and there was a little daughter too, in Florida. It was none of my business. He didn’t offer, so I didn’t ask. Are you all right, Lieutenant?”

“This is — just —” She dropped her pen and it bounced off her desk calendar. “Go on.”

“Neil was a bit — off — but nice guy, good teacher when he worked for me. We worked together until about 14 or 15 years ago, when he and his son moved to Miami so he could take care of his daughter. Money problems, I remember, always biting off more than he could chew, always asking me if those loans on TV, the high-interest payday loans, were legitimate. I’d give him advice, and he’d never listen.”

“We certainly know the same Neil Tiposi.”

“But nice, harmless, you know? I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, and he calls me up out of nowhere three years ago, we talk for a while, and he asks if I could write a recommendation for his friend’s son, since I was acquainted with the principal over there. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Three years ago would have been when Lucia was dealing with the fallout of trying to convince her 85-year-old mother to move into a nursing home. Her head might have already been clouded with guilt anyway. Maybe she’d felt guilty for doubting Neil years ago, mistaking one sort of guilt for another, and thought she was doing good by helping him out, writing that letter on Daniel’s behalf.

Benson could see the guilt now in Lucia’s narrowed eyes, in her quick breaths. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she repeated. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Benson said. “Do you mind if I share what I told you with the head of the federal-city task force investigating the related crimes?”

“No, of course I don’t mind.”

“Thank you for coming forward.”

“I should have been smarter three years ago, or at least come forward as soon as I heard about Daniel.”

If Neil had been bad with money back then, making poor decisions regarding shady loans, he might have gotten himself involved with the same people who’d murdered Mira. He might have been involved with them before he’d met Mira, the implications of which reverberated through an almost 40-year-long timeline. That was the theory she was going to bring to Eames.

_And this came from where?_ she imagined Eames saying.

_My mother-in-law_ , she’d answer, _who’s not currently speaking to my —_

My _mother-in-law_?

Where had that come from? Benson wondered. Less than five months ago, Barba had left her standing alone on a street in lower Manhattan, and she’d chased after him, telling him off until he broke down outside the subway, and now she was thinking of Lucia as her _mother-in-law_?

“Thank you, Mrs. Barba,” she said.

“Rafael’s really going up to Albany this week, making a fool of himself in front of the state senate?”

“No comment.”

“He always wanted to be a judge. We thought he would be. He had that passion, that wisdom, in him.”

“He still has a lot of passion and wisdom.”

“He threw it all away. I’m surprised you forgave him.”

“I love him,” Benson said. 

“Of course I love him too. I could look past his other mistakes, but this —”

“Why don’t you talk to him?”

“I don’t know.” Lucia shook her head. “Not much patience left in these 70-year-old bones.”

“For your passionate, wise son, I’m sure you can summon it up.”

“You’re a saint, Olivia. It’s not good for your health to be a saint.”

—

A few years back, Barba finally mustered the courage to talk to Benson about what was between them, what had been between them since they met (for the second, or third, or perhaps fourth time), despite his reservations about a romantic relationship throwing the DA’s office into turmoil, risking all the cases they’d worked on, exposing his long-ago error in providing a “loan” to a strung-out witness in Brooklyn. As soon as he decided to take the risk, he learned that Benson had been involved with the head of IAB for weeks.

So, it broke his heart a little.

His heart had never really been whole as long as he could remember, but the news about Tucker cracked some of the shards that made up what could have been a whole heart just a little more.

After Dodds’s funeral, he watched his colleagues grieve and recalled that there were far worse kinds of broken hearts. 

The fallacy of relative privation: there are worse heartaches than your heartache, so your heartache doesn’t matter.

Native New Yorkers, no matter their myriad differences, all internalize that fallacy, without exception. They internalize it and pass it on to the next generation.

Carisi was worried about Barba on account of the death threats.

Sonny Carisi was charming. That dopey accent, hair about an inch too tall, that smirk that easily spread into a smile, would have been exactly what he needed at that moment in his life if not for the conflict of interest, the same one he would have had with Liv, the same one Liv had ignored when she’d started sleeping with Tucker.

He wound up inviting Carisi back to his apartment after they toasted Dodds at a downtown bar frequented by NYPD commanding officers. A little too much whiskey, a little too much heartbreak, Carisi’s gentle eyes, all of that made Barba tell him — however foolishly — about his feelings for his lieutenant. “But that’s all over and done with now,” he said, scooting closer to Carisi on the couch, hoping the man who’d clearly had a crush on him for two years would get the hint that he could use some comfort. 

“I’ve wanted different things at different points in my life, too,” Carisi said, almost wistfully. 

“You’ve got a little crush on me?” Barba whispered, strategically, into Carisi’s ear, his lips ghosting his earlobe. 

“Yes,” Carisi said, “let me show you.”

He remembered how Carisi had smiled that big, genuine smile when he kissed him, deep but sweet, as they lay together half-asleep at three in the morning. He remembered how distraught Carisi was over Dodds, how he offered to hold the younger man, to listen to him, and how much Carisi appreciated that. 

And how, when they stumbled back into his bedroom after breakfast, Carisi asked him to turn the snark back on, and Barba, absolutely bemused, said, “of course.” 

A few days later, when Carisi hadn’t acknowledged their night together, Barba suggested that they look further into what they’d started.

Carisi apologetically declined. Although he was already in his mid-thirties, he still thought of his own sexuality as made up of “phases” and “crushes,” or at least that was how he explained it. “I don’t even know if that’s all right to say. It’s my experience, you know, but I feel like I hurt other people when I say _phases_ , and I’m not ready for … anything more than what we had.”

Two broken hearts in a row. Manhattan SVU was a death trap.

Barba hoped, nevertheless, that Carisi would come to terms one of these days with what he hedged his way through by calling “phases,” the _what even is that_ s and _oh, come on, that’s just too many years around that enlightened boss of yours_ and inappropriate discussions of _what counts as_ he’d get from his parents and at least the youngest and oldest of his three sisters.

As he pressed his forehead to the window of the Amtrak train headed south from Albany on a late July afternoon, Barba wasn’t sure why Carisi had come to mind. Maybe because Liv had been working the Zadon case with him. Maybe because Liv had said that at their age, it was acceptable to talk about, and think about, past loves on the terms that you loved them. Or maybe it was to protect his mind — his heart — from the realization, the reality, that he’d never be _el juez_.

The state senate was fairly kind, apologetic even, about the whole thing. “You understand why, given the nature of your interference in the Householder case as a prosecutor, approving you for a judicial appointment, particularly for family court, is neither advisable nor recommended.”

They were nice about it. Their explanations made sense. Nobody brought up Alex Muñoz. In a way, it was better than Barba had expected.

Slumped over, fortunately without a seatmate for the entirety of the ride, he stared at the platform of the Rhinecliff station as the train pulled away. He willed himself not to experience what had happened as the staggering loss of a dream. 

He was still in the black suit he’d worn to the hearing that morning, purple tie rolled up and tucked into his briefcase, the top three buttons of his dress shirt undone. He’d left his suit jacket on to combat the chill of the train’s cranked-up air conditioner.

When he emerged from underground into the main concourse at Penn Station, he drew in a sharp breath. With his feet planted on the faux-marble floor beneath him, the end of the dream finally hit hard.

_Lo siento, abuelita,_ he thought, _forgive me, forgive me, forgive me_.

He would never forgive himself for the single, uncharacteristic decision that led to the demise of his career. 

But this time, instead of running from Liv, his instinct was to run to her.

He got to her place around 9, and she immediately pulled him into a tight embrace. Without letting go, she kissed his cheek. “I’m proud of you,” she told him. 

“Liv.” His voice broke on the single, short syllable. He felt pressure behind his eyes and a lump in his throat. “Why?”

“Because you knew there was a 90 percent chance they’d say no, and you went anyway.”

“I’m sorry, “ he said into her shoulder.

“For what?”

“I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry I flipped that switch for Maggie Householder when it was never my place, especially not as the prosecutor trying to plead out the husband.”

“The only time you let me down was when you kissed me goodbye.”

“I love you,” he promised, his arms still clutching her. He kissed her lips before burying his head back in her shoulder.

“I love you, and it’s okay, you can let it out, Rafa, sweetheart,” she said, freeing one arm to run a hand through his hair. “It’s okay. You didn’t let me down today.”

He squeezed his eyes shut as emotion overwhelmed every muscle on his face. “Shh, I love you, I have faith in you,” Benson said as she pet the back of his neck and kissed his temples.

“You — you shouldn’t have to be in a position where —” He was stammering through tears.

“Shut up.”

“Shut up?”

“Yes. Shut up and love me.”

He pulled away and, certain his eyes were lined with red, assured her, “Always. All ways.”

She smiled broadly, gorgeously. His genuine promises, his coming back to her in spite of all his failures, was what made her smile.

His biggest mistake had been flipping that switch as a favor to Maggie Householder. His worst failure had been saying goodbye to Liv after the trial.

“Uncle Rafa?”

They broke from their embrace, both wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands, and turned to face Noah, who stood in the living room in his pajamas. 

“What’re you doing awake, sweet boy?” Benson said.

“Did you get to be a judge?” he asked, a hint of caution in his voice when he looked up at Barba.

“No,” Barba said, “I didn’t.”

“Oh. Yeah, I heard Mom on the phone with you before. She sounded sad, but I hoped you got to be a judge anyway.”

“We need to have a talk about eavesdropping, kiddo,” Benson warned.

Noah gritted his teeth for a moment, and then threw his arms around Barba. Barba knelt so that he could fully embrace his — _his_ , what the hell was that, fortunately only an internal slip-up, _his_ , his what? — so he could fully embrace Noah.

“I was just waiting to see if you came here tonight. I wanted you to read me a story.”

_I was just waiting to see if you came here tonight._

Noah had stayed up waiting for him, and Barba knew why: he must have wanted to see if this time, unlike the last, Uncle Rafa would come back.


	13. Stupidity-Malice Continuum

The call from Eames came at two in the morning, just as Benson and Barba were finally dozing off after a few hours of trying to forget — as quietly as they could, but Barba was unexpectedly _loud_ in bed, which Benson found simultaneously hot, endearing, and a little hilarious — the previous day’s disappointments, or at least put a band-aid on those disappointments.

When Benson saw Eames’ name on her phone, she wondered if the joint task force had finally found Daniel. She feared, however, that the call was about Laura.

“You need to fly down to Miami with me in the morning,” Eames said, not bothering with a greeting. “I’m picking you up in three hours.”

“What happened?” She bolted into a sitting position. Barba stirred and then sat up too, probably sensing Benson’s worry.

“Your detective — who I’m sure you had no idea was in Miami, as I told Dodds — got beaten up pretty bad by Braden Eglund, aka Baconeggandcheese. He smashed your detective’s face into a brick wall.”

“Oh my God.” Benson covered her mouth with her hand, then used the same hand to throw the covers off. “I found out he was down there two days ago. I should have called and told him to stay out of the federal investigation or I’d have his badge. Is he all right?”

“Broken nose, and they’re keeping him in ICU for 48 hours since —”

“Since he just had a concussion in March. I should have called him.”

“I assured Dodds you didn’t send him, that there was no way you’d risk your career over this.”

“There are a few things I’d risk my career for. This is not one of them.” 

Amy was gone. Mira was long gone. Paul had already spent five years in a prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Lucia Barba had been tricked into writing a letter of reference for Daniel, who’d assaulted students at an Upper West Side day school. The vast stupidity of Neil Tiposi had wreaked all the havoc it was going to wreak.

But Daniel’s victims had no recourse to justice as long as he was missing. His sisters had none at all, since the statutes of limitations were up in both Florida and New York, and the one family member who’d tried to help them had been killed by a hitman in order to protect a multi-layer extortion scheme.

Two awful families, a host of now-adult (some now-buried) daughters and sons with no recourse to anything, Secretly, she was a tiny bit glad that Carisi had risked his own career to try to find Daniel and nail him, figuratively, to a wall. But he hadn’t found Daniel.

“He’s awake and lucid,” Eames said, “but the ICU is required because of the previous injury, is what he told my detective.”

Worry had spread across Barba’s face too.

“Did they contact his family?” Benson asked.

“Carisi told them not to, said they’d “freak out with worry.” Look, Liv, I just got off the phone with Dodds, who you know loves being woken up at two in the morning, and I told him I need you to come with me. I know you have Noah at home, I can imagine your concerns, but we’ll have the feds, lots of resources behind us, and it’ll be a day or two max.”

“Why are you all of a sudden so interested in my help?”

“Because Tiposi may have told Baconegg — Braden Eglund — to beat up Carisi.”

“Damn it.”

As Benson spat out the two words, Barba’s phone rang. He picked up and launched immediately into a rapid bilingual conversation (argument?) with the caller. 

“Let me talk to my nanny,” Benson said, “and Amanda Rollins, and … Rafael … and I’ll give you an answer in ten minutes even if I don’t hear back from Lucy or Amanda.”

“Got it,” Eames said.

Barba set his phone on the bed. “That was my friend Santiago Garcia in Miami,” he told Benson. “Eddie’s cousin, the defense attorney.” He hopped up and frantically searched the nightstand for his undershirt, switching off the bedroom air conditioner when he couldn’t find it. “He said Carisi nosing around could endanger Laura.”

“He was trying to find Daniel, for our case. I don’t think Carisi is aware of the connection to Laura.”

“He’s smart. I’m sure he figured it out. Regardless, Laura may be hiding from a hit out on her and Carisi nosing in to the Zadon family could make her troubles worse.”

“They’re got him in ICU,” Benson said, scrubbing a hand over her face. “He’s awake, fine, really, they just have to be —”

“Careful, I know. Santiago told me.”

She sent texts to Lucy and Rollins, and the stood up and touched Barba’s shoulder. “I wonder,” she said, “if I was the first one to tip Laura off to the fact that her client might have been connected to the Zadons. She sounded so flustered on the phone that day. She might not have known.”

“She didn’t. She couldn’t have. But at least this means she might be safe, and that you — however incidentally — kept her safe.” His tongue darted out to lick his lower lip. “You need to go to Miami to collect your detective?”

Benson nodded, feeling a bit deflated. She wasn’t sure why: maybe exhaustion, maybe empathy for Barba, maybe frustration that they’d been looking for Daniel for almost five months, with no leads in sight, maybe all the collateral damage Will Zadon’s cruel insistence on prioritizing all the wrong things had caused.

“Go,” Barba said, dipping his head to catch her gaze. “I’ll take tomorrow — today — off.”

“You haven’t been at your job that long.”

“I have personal days I can use. I’m not due in court tomorrow, or at all next week, anyhow. I’ll stay with Noah today and Saturday.”

“What are you going to do with a six year old?”

Barba shrugged. “I’ll be here. You do what you need to do.”

“After this,” she said, leaning in to an embrace, “I’m putting in for retirement.”

“No,” he said, the word a sweet lament on his lips. He ran a hand through her hair. “Not before we get to call you Captain.”

“Well, if —.” She stopped herself. She hadn’t told him about the captain exam, about how she was up for promotion, because she, like him, had suspected that the state senate was sure to put the kibosh on his judicial appointment. 

She’d hoped otherwise, but the truth was, he’d pulled the plug on a dying infant involved in a case he was prosecuting, an act of misconduct — not as criminal as McCoy and his insistence on a murder trial suggested, but serious misconduct still — that couldn’t be overlooked. 

She would tell him eventually, at least before she was promoted, but today was not the right day.

“If what?” he asked, starting to kiss a path down her neck.

“Nothing.”

He grinned, almost wickedly. “Did you already pass the captain exam?”

“Yes,” she admitted, letting a breath out through her nose.

“And you didn’t tell me because —”

“Because.”

“You could have told me. It’s a major accomplishment.” He bunched the material on the back of her tank top between his fingers and kissed his way up to her jawline. “Your accomplishments don’t take anything away from me. I’d be profoundly selfish to think that. Listen — go to Miami, don’t be _too_ hard on Carisi, and come back, and don’t worry.”

“You’re really not … tired … yet?” she asked, giving his half-hard crotch a squeeze.

“For you, after all these years, never.”

“You’re an old man, though,” she said, a sweet, teasing smile on her face.

“You need to get yourself to Miami.”

“After all these years,” she said, repeating his earlier sentiment. 

“I’m just saying —”

“Did you _think_ about me before we got together, Rafael Barba?” she asked with a tone of mock accusation. 

“Oh, I’ll tell you all about it when you come home,” he promised.

She smiled again, took his face in her hands, and kissed him. “Okay. I’m going to call Eames. Then I’ll pack and wake up Noah. He’ll be mad.”

“Ice cream and a couple of carousel rides in Bryant Park will solve that, won’t it?”

Benson laughed. “Mostly. I’ve got to call Eames. I love you.”

After she showered and packed a bag, she woke Noah at 4:30 in the morning to tell him that she needed to go on a trip for work. “Can I come?” he asked immediately.

“No, sweet boy, you can’t. I have work to do. But I’ll be back Saturday night, and Uncle Rafa is taking off from work so he can spend time with you. Will you be good for him?”

“I want to go with you,” Noah complained.

Barba, who had been standing near the doorway of Noah’s room, joined Benson. “How about I take you for ice cream tomorrow afternoon?” he asked.

“Fine,” Noah said begrudgingly. “But can’t you come home tonight, Mom?”

Even when she’d worked ridiculously long shifts, she and Noah hadn’t spent a full night apart since he was kidnapped by Sheila Porter. 

“I’ve got a lot of work to do, sweet boy. I’ll bring you home presents.”

He climbed out of bed and followed Benson and Barba into the living room. “Will you bring Uncle Rafa a present too?”

“Sure. What should I bring him?”

Noah shrugged. “I don’t know. Are you guys in love now?”

Benson sputtered. Barba licked his lips nervously.

“Yes,” Benson answered plainly.

“Yes,” Barba echoed.

“Are you going to get married? Is Uncle Rafa going to come live with us?”

She wanted to ask _do you want him to_ , but it was too soon for that, too soon to get Noah’s hopes up again after Barba had disappeared from their lives so suddenly in February. “One step at a time,” she said instead.

—

They went straight from the airport to the hospital, where they found Carisi sitting nervously in a chair in the corner of the ICU, his nose taped up, two black (and blue and green and yellow and maroon) eyes, long legs trembling, hospital-socked heels bouncing up and down on the floor. “Thank God,” he said, standing slowly, “people who aren’t doctors or nurses. I’m going fucking crazy in here.” All around him were patients in much more serious condition, and loud arrhythmic beep, everywhere. “They won’t let me go, or even have a room, ‘cause this is my second concussion in four months.”

“Come here.” Benson wriggled her fingers, inviting Carisi into a hug. “I’m furious at you, 1PP and IAB are going to be on your ass for at least the rest of the year, but I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I can’t fly for a week,” Carisi said, “and the neurologist laughed at me when I asked if I could drive back.”

“I don’t think 1PP’s going to spring for a hotel room, Sonny.”

“Nope,” Eames said.

“I think your guy Tiposi expected Baconeggandcheese to kill me, not beat me up.”

“You have evidence for that, or are you just trying to garner more sympathy points?” Eames asked.

“I have —”

“Because you already have a lot.”

Carisi half-smiled. “Baconeggandcheese said something weird when he smashed my head into a wall. I mean, what could you say that’s not weird when you’re smashing somebody’s head into a wall, right? He says, “what’d you have me drug my own girlfriend for, so you could fucking throw her off a bridge?” While he’s got me by the hair, he —“

“Okay,” Eames interrupted, “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on account of your face, Detective, but that sounds pretty convenient for someone who’s trying to get the ME to re-open Amy Rankin’s file.”

“It does, doesn’t it? Swear to God, I’m not lying. And I know they’re going to say I’m a useless witness since he was smashing my face into a wall when I heard him say it, but — I can’t wait to get out of here. Anyway, Baconeggandcheese — I should call him Eglund, yeah? — Was talking about jumping off a bridge himself. I was conscious when the local cops got to the scene, so I told them to put him on suicide watch just in case. I don’t know if they listened. Be careful when you question him, all right?”

Carisi sat again, and Benson laid an open hand on his shoulder. “We’re on our way to talk to him.”

“You can tell Dodds, I only talked to two people while I was here: the other lawyer on Amy’s case, and Neil’s cleaning lady.”

“And Eglund,” Benson reminded him.

“That was more of an unexpected encounter.”

“I’ll see what I can do about finding you somewhere to stay.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“You’re still in trouble, though.”

“I know.”

“All right, take care, Carisi,” Eames said. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed that Dodds and IAB take pity on your face.”

Eames started for the door. Behind her, Benson patted Carisi’s shoulder again and mouthed the words _thank you_.

—

Their next stop was the local precinct where Braden Eglund was being held until the feds decided what to do with him. “My request,” Eames told Benson. “This case is still happening in two states.”

“A real change of heart.”

“A real “we have to find Daniel Zadon before any more of your squad fucks up jurisdiction and-or lands in the hospital” is what I’m looking at. We’re going to question Eglund today and we’ll have you on a flight home tomorrow morning.”

“What about Neil?”

“Even if what Carisi said is true —”

“It is.”

“I meant he could have heard wrong. Even if he heard right, you can’t question Tiposi. He was married to your friend.

_You investigated your husband’s murder when it was re-opened,_ Benson wanted to remind her.

“I head up a task force now. Got to play completely by the book,” Eames said, as if she’d read Benson’s mind.

Santiago Garcia was waiting for them outside the precinct. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my client,” he said.

“Her death was ruled a suicide by the New York County medical examiner,” Eames reminded him, “and Ms. Rankin hasn’t been your client for months. If you’re interested in locating your co-worker, so are we.”

“Co-worker,” Santiago said, clearly feigning confusion. “You don’t mean Laura Perez, do you?”

“Cut the shit,” Eames said.

Benson remembered Dara Zadon, whose struggles and need for justice had been lost in a larger federal criminal picture. “Captain Eames,” she said, “may I have a moment with Mr. Garcia?”

Eames looked doubtful, but gave Benson five minutes.

“How is he?” Santiago asked her. “The detective who was attacked. I called Rafael at two this morning.”

“I know,” Benson said absentmindedly. 

Santiago let out a laugh. “God bless Rita Calhoun.”

“She had nothing to do with it.”

“Please, when we were at my place this winter —” Santiago cut himself off, probably realizing that he wouldn’t ingratiate himself to her if he continued that story. “Anyway, I heard Detective — Carisi? — was still in ICU.”

“Extreme caution, we just saw him, he’s doing all right.” She looked over at the door to make sure Eames was inside. “I’ll trade you information about your client in exchange for a place for Carisi to stay for a week until he’s cleared for travel.”

“I have a spare bedroom. Had Laura in there and Rafi on my couch for a few weeks. I called it the Home for Abogados Tristes.”

“Carisi’s technically a lawyer — went to Fordham at night, passed the Bar on his first try — so he’ll fit right in. What happened with Amy?”

“Her death might not have been a suicide. Her father may have been involved.”

“Stupid.”

“Yes.”

“If you read the last two fanfics, Amy seems to know a lot about why her father married his first wife.”

“His first wife?” Santiago was confused. “Amy’s mother was his first wife.”

“That’s not possible. Amy was conceived when Neil was married to Mira. He married Amy’s mother for insurance and custody purposes when she was diagnosed with an aggressive breast cancer.”

“Are you telling me that I have information you don’t?”

Benson took out her phone and texted Eames, asking for five more minutes. Eames said she’d come down and get her when they brought Eglund into interrogation. _I’m getting us something we can use up there_ , she promise in her response.

“I’ll send Rafael after you to get what I need,” Benson joked.

“That seems like a poorly-thought-out procedural tactic.” Santiago looked up at the sky, lost in thought for a moment. “All I know is, we do these full background checks on all our clients so nobody can spring anything on us in court, and Neil married his first wife, Marianne Rankin, when he was in his early 20s, and somehow scored an annulment before he went to New York even though they’d been married for five years. He kept coming back to Marianne, though, to the point he got her pregnant when he was still married to Lieutenant Margolis.

Benson was right. Neil hd never had a grandmother in Miami.

“Then you know about the connection between Lieutenant Margolis — Mira — and Will Zadon.”

“Not from the background check. It was the phone call,” Santiago said. “You called Laura and she went into a panic when she realized that Will, who had some very dangerous connections, might have something to do with our client. Turns out he’d put a hit out on her. She knew she’d be next to turn up in the Hudson River if she didn’t go into hiding. Will and Cordelia blamed her for everything, for almost exposing the family’s extortion scheme. She was a liability to them. If they found out she was representing Amy, even though you and I know it was pure chance, they’d have had her killed. That’s why Will put the hit out on her before he died.”

“I’m so sorry I called her.”

“You warned her. You might have saved her life. Without knowing it, you warned her that something wasn’t right.”

“What if,” Benson said suddenly, “Neil coming to your firm, specifically to Laura, wasn’t chance at all.”

“A big “what if,” but that’s your job.”

Benson was nothing if not strategic. “If you have any way to get a message to her, let Laura know not to come out of hiding until Neil Tiposi is behind bars.”


	14. Pardon

Lucy came over at 7 to work her usual shift, but Barba told her she could go home at noon, since he’d taken the day off. “Noah’ll be okay with that?” she asked. “You haven’t exactly been a familiar face around here, Mr. Barba.”

He’d practically been living at Benson’s place since the end of May, so he wondered what Lucy meant by “you haven’t exactly been a familiar face.”

Maybe she meant that he’d changed, that he was only a shadow of the prosecutor, of the man, he’d once been. 

She wasn’t wrong.

Her quick smile, tinged with a hint of sarcasm, suggested that his assessment was correct.

As he stepped out of the shower, he heard his phone ringing in the bedroom. He was surprised to see _Mami_ on the screen.

“Mami?” he said, cradling the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he stepped into his pants.

“I couldn’t reach Olivia,” she said flatly.

“You were trying to reach —”

“I’m a witness — algo así — in one of her cases. I called her precinct. They wouldn’t tell me where she was.”

“What?” he practically spat out.

“No es asunto tuyo. Where is she?”

“I can’t say either. Federal case.”

“Hm. Thank you.”

“Mami, wait, don’t hang up. I’m with Noah, Olivia’s son, today. I’m taking him to the carousel in Bryant Park, and there’s usually a puppet show there in the summer, and — your bus stops right across the street. Come meet us for ice cream.”

He wasn’t sure whether or not Lucia had hung up on him until he heard a sharp intake of breath on the other end.

“I know I let you down,” he continued. “I know I must have scared the hell out of you. But we should talk.”

“You’re really going to use ice cream and Olivia’s son to badger me into seeing you, after all you put me through?”

_What about all you put me through?_ the small voice he kept hidden wanted to ask.

“I had to prepare for you to go to jail. You broke my heart, flushing your career and all the hopes Abuelita and I had for you down the toilet on account of a selfish thing you did because you couldn’t get over yourself for not being able to pull the plug on a selfish man.”

“Mami, I —” He’d hesitated to sign the papers to take his father off life support because it felt like killing him, and killing him might feel good, and if killing him felt good then he was a sinner and a criminal. Mourning, melancholia, guilt, nightmares. “I should have asked SVU to put a different prosecutor on the case.”

“Fine,” was all Lucia said. “Tell Olivia to call me when she gets back.”

At the park, which was really a grassy cement lawn behind the Fifth Avenue library, he and Noah watched a puppet show and rode the carousel no fewer than three times. Afterwards, they found a metal table by the food stands (“check for bird poop before you sit down,” Noah wisely warned in a loud whisper) and got Belgian waffles spattered with cookie-bespecked ice cream.

“Will Mom be home tomorrow?” Noah asked. There was already ice cream in his hair.

“By Sunday at the latest,” Barba promised.

“When Grandma Sheila took me without Mom’s per-mission,” Noah explained, concentrating more on picking at his waffle than the seriousness of what he was talking about, “she kept saying Mom was going to see us soon, but she was lying.”

“Noah, you saw Mom this morning, and she told you herself she’d be back, right?”

“Right.”

“So you take her word, not mine, she’ll be home by Sunday.”

“Okay.”

How had the kid managed to get ice cream on his forehead? Barba wondered.

His eyes drifted across the street, where he spotted Lucia crossing behind a crowd of tourists. Briefly, he panicked.

“Hey, Noah, I see my mami crossing the street over there. If you don’t feel comfortable, we don’t have to talk to her, and if you want me to call your mom and let you hear her voice —”

Noah shrugged. “No. It’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Barba stood and waved his mother over. A year ago, eight months ago, even, she’d have immediately hugged him, but today, she merely nodded and pursed her lips in an attempt at a smile. 

When she looked down at Noah, however, she really did smile. “You must be Noah,” she said.

“Are you Uncle Rafa’s mom?”

“Yes. You can call me Lucia.”

“That sounds like Lucy. She takes care of me when my Mom’s at work. My mom went on a trip to Miami.”

Lucia raised one eyebrow and sat in the empty chair between them. “Miami?”

“Ese es el caso you wanted to talk to Liv about?”

“Te lo dije, no es asunto tuyo.”

“Are you guys speaking Spanish?” Noah interrupted.

“Sí,” Lucia said. “You should learn. It’s good for your brain.” She mussed his curls. “Uncle Rafa lets you walk around with ice cream in your hair? You’ll attract wasps.” She picked up a napkin and wiped the front of his hair. “Raf, you have any baby wipes?”

“I’m not a baby,” Noah protested.

“But I”ll bet your mami carries them around with her for you.”

“She doesn’t call them baby wipes, just wipes.”

Barba shrugged.

“Oh, you’ll learn, Papi,” Lucia said, flashing an unapologetic smirk in Barba’s direction.

“So after this, we are going back to Noah’s apartment,” Barba said, compelled to reassure the boy that no more strange grandmas would be taking him anywhere. Barba reached over and pat his mother’s hand. “I told Noah and his mom how sorry I was for making them sad this winter.”

“Did you make your mom sad too?” Noah asked.

“Yes,” Barba said with a wince.

“You should get her waffles and ice cream too.”

“I should.”

“No, thank you,” Lucia said, facing Noah. “I’ll have a terrible bellyache before dinner.” 

She smiled wistfully at nothing in particular. He recognized the tears glistening in her eyes when she grasped his hand.

Lucia leaned in towards her son. “Te perdono,” she said into his ear.

“What does that mean?” the nosy six-year-old with them asked.

“It means,” Barba said, pausing to swallow the lump in his throat, “I forgive you.”

“That’s good. Uncle Rafa is very, very, very sorry, you know, he said it to me and my mom already, like, a thousand times.”

Half an hour later, they walked Lucia back to her bus, which stopped right in front of the park. “This was low,” she whispered to her son. “A dirty trick, using the kid to win me over.”

“I love you, Mami. There’s a lot of broken hearts I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to fix, trying to make up for.”

Lucia took a deep, shaky breath, clearly trying to hold back tears. “My Rafi,” she said, drawing him into an embrace even as one of his hands clutched Noah’s. “You are a good man. You keep being a good man, you make up for what you’ve done.”

Barba tried not to let his face crumple in front of Noah. Lucia’s forgiveness was imperfect, but it was enough. 

“You’ll have to get it re-insured,” Lucia said under her breath, “pero te daré el anillo. Abuelita’s.”

“Para …?”

“You know what for,” she said, smacking his arm. “Before I”m 90, okay, mijo?”

“Okay.”

Lucia’s bus pulled up and she waved to Noah as she stepped inside. As he watched the bus head uptown, Barba placed a hand on Noah’s shoulder.

—

“I was supposed to drug Amy for the sake of getting her out of the country, for her own protection,” Braden Eglund — aka YouTube star Baconeggandcheese, as Carisi would surely remind them as soon as he was back on his feet — explained, gesturing wildly at Benson and Eames from behind the interrogation table. “I swear, I swear, I swear.”

“You’re telling me you believed that?” Benson said, feigning exasperation. “Alex, I think this guy’s an idiot.”

“I’m sure his future father-in-law told him a very convincing story. A very well-crafted lie.”

“Yes,” Braden said loudly. “Yes, exactly, he said Amy knew we had to get her out of the country, but she knew, like, she knew she wasn’t allowed to know when we were getting her out or how we were getting her out, you get what I mean?”

Benson and Eames both nodded slowly, very slowly.

“So we went to a place in Vermont, near the border with Canada, and hid out there for a couple of months. I figured Amy’s dad would tell us to run across the border from there, but, no, he tells us to come to New York instead.”

“When?” Benson asked.

“March.”

“March,” Benson repeated, looking over at Eames.

“That’s where I drugged her, in New York. Neil said we were all going over the border together.”

“And you had to drug her because …?”

“I don’t know, damn it!” All his limbs were shaking. “This made lots more sense when Amy’s dad explained it.”

“Okay, Braden, it’s okay,” Eames said. “Help yourself out. Take a breath, and tell us what happened next.”

“Next thing I know, I go to get my suitcase from me and Amy’s room and I come back and Amy’s gone. There’s, like, a loud bang — not a gun or anything, but real loud — and I go running back into the hotel room and Amy’s gone, just like that. Neil tells me about this crooked cop who came in, and next thing I know, they’re saying she jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and her lawyer’s gone too, so I said, I’m not touching this one or I’m going to wind up under the Staten Island Ferry myself.”

“So why did you get involved again?” Eames asked.

“Neil told me about Carisi the other day. He said Carisi was the crooked cop who took Amy, probably threw her off the bridge too.”

“And you believed him.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because he was making everything up as he went along.”

“I swear, this made so much more sense when Neil said it.”

“You’re lucky,” Eames told Braden, standing and closing in on him with a few slow steps. “We think Neil expected you to kill Carisi.”

“What the hell? I know I beat him up pretty bad, fine, but I’d never kill anybody.”

Eames looked over at Benson. They had, for the moment, what they needed.

After they wrapped up the interrogation, Benson called Carisi to fill him in. Amy’s murder had taken place entirely in New York City, which meant that they — technically, because it was a homicide peripherally related to an SVU case — shared jurisdiction with the feds.

“Get me out of here, Lieutenant,” Carisi begged. “I’m freaking out.”

“I’ll come see you again after we pick up Tiposi.”

“You can’t pick him up. He’s your friend’s husband, and you’re NYPD. You can’t arrest a guy in Florida.”

“I’ll be with Eames and a whole bunch of feds. I’m an observer. It’s fine.”

“If you say so, boss.”

“Hey, Carisi?”

“Yeah?” 

“You’re still in trouble, but I appreciate your work. It’s nice having a detective with a law degree, who actually passed the Bar, around. Not something you see too often. Thank you for being a voice of reason.”

“Me, the moron who went down to Miami and got his nose broken.” Carisi was silent for a few seconds. “Thank you, though, for finding me a place to stay so quickly. Rafael’s friend’s cousin, the defense attorney, is coming to get me tomorrow morning when they let me out of here. I’m not allowed to fly for a week.”

“Breathe, Carisi. You’ll be all right.”

By late afternoon, they burst into Neil Tiposi’s house, where the back door was open, all the drawers emptied, half of his clothes removed from a closet in the upstairs bedroom. “He must have left the second we picked up Braden,” Benson said hoarsely. “He’s connected to Daniel, to the Zadons, to everybody. We’ve got to get him.”

“You think he’s with —” Eames started to say.

“Oh, God, please don’t drag Paul into this. That man has lost most of his adulthood to police investigations. He spent half of his twenties in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Amy was his sister. Mira was his mother. Even if he thought of Neil as his dad, and he probably did, if he showed up at Paul’s door, Paul would turn him in. Neil’s responsible for Amy’s and Mira’s death, Amy’s more directly, if Mr. Bacon-Egg is right.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do know. Give him 24 hours, then do whatever you have to do.”

—

The feds put Benson and Eames on an early flight out of Miami, so early that when she got home, she found Barba and Noah at the dining room table, Noah still in his pajamas, eating breakfast. “Mom!” he shouted, leaping up from his chair so that he almost knocked it over. He ran to hug her.

“Is this the same Noah who grumbles at me and slams his door when I ask him to pick up his toys from the living room floor? I’m shocked.”

“Hmph,” Noah said. 

“I missed you too, sweet boy.” She kissed the top of his head. “You and Uncle Rafa didn’t get into too much trouble?”

“We went to the park, the one without any trees by the big library, and had ice cream and Uncle Rafa’s mami was there.”

“Oh,” Benson said, rolling her small suitcase into the hall and leaving her bag on the kitchen counter. “I am very happy to hear that.”

Barba stood and, his hand brushing her hip, lightly kissed her lips. “You didn’t tell me she was involved in a case you were working,” he said softly.

“It’s an active investigation. I can’t talk about it.”

He kissed her again. “I’m glad you’re home.”

“I hope you and Lucia were able to work out some of what’s been between you.”

“We’re off to a … start.”

Benson’s cell phone rang with an unfamiliar number. “Hello,” she said, half expecting a robocall or car insurance scam pitch.

“Aunt Liv.”

She recognized Paul’s voice immediately, and besides, no one other than Paul and Jesse Rollins called her _Aunt Liv_. 

“You’re my phone call.”

She slapped a hand over her heart.

“I’m … I can’t, I’m …”

“Where are you?”

“Rikers,” he said, and she heard a sob in his throat. “I’m being arraigned for murder on Monday.”

“The COs are listening to your call, do not say anything else,” she instructed him. “I have a defense attorney with me. I’m going to put you on with him.”

“All right. Thank you, Aunt Liv.”

“Paul Margolis, Rikers,” was all Benson said when she handed him the phone, and Barba nodded as if he immediately understood everything. 

When Barba got off the phone with Paul, he told Benson that he was going to pick up a suit from his place and go to Rikers to shut down any further attempts at interrogation, and then get Paul arraigned that afternoon so he could be bailed out before the end of the weekend. 

“Come here,” he told Benson before he left, waving her into the hallway leading to the bedrooms, where Noah couldn’t hear them. “I think he may have confessed, in the initial interrogation, to killing his father.”

“That almost makes sense, in context of what happened. His dad may have married his mom in order to keep the 1980s New York mafia informed about an extortion scheme that Will Zadon was running on one of its members.”

“I need something I can use to argue self defense so the arraignment judge sets reasonable bail.”

“How about the fact that the feds had a warrant for Neil’s arrest, on evidence that he arranged his own daughter’s murder, and may have even participated in it?”

“That’s what I need,” Barba said.

“Let me know what happens,” she said as they made their way back to the dining room. 

“I’ll call you when I’m out of arraignment court. I won’t let them hold him without setting bail all weekend.” He bent down to Noah’s level. “I’ll see you tonight?”

“You’re coming back?” the boy asked.

“I may not be back until after you’re asleep, but I’m coming back to you and Mom, I promise.”

“Make sure you call this into your firm as billable hours,” Benson said when they were at the door. “I’ll find a way to get them paid.”

“Liv.” He stopped in his tracks, reaching out to touch her arm. “Don’t worry about it. We’re family.”


	15. Afterlives

Barba arrived at Rikers in time to shut down NYPD’s second interrogation of Paul Margolis. He told the detectives that Tiposi’s murder was connected to a federal case, and that they were to seek approval from Captain Eames before going any further. As soon as the detectives agreed to contact Eames before moving ahead, Barba used the few connections he still had to the DA’s office to demand an arraignment hearing that day, on a Saturday afternoon.

In a stroke of dumb luck that he and the SVU team had experienced a few times before, Neil had been shot in a hotel room in Manhattan, so the case was jurisdictionally linked to McCoy.

In court, he found himself standing opposite EADA Michael Cutter, who he was surprised-but-not-surprised had come out to arraignment court on a Saturday. His former second chair, Connie Rubirosa, was a federal attorney now, prosecuting cases for joint task forces like the ones Eames headed up. Cutter had probably shown up himself instead of sending an assistant as a favor to Rubirosa, who was prosecuting Cordelia Zadon’s case. That was Barba’s best guess.

“Look here,” Cutter said, half under his breath, “Rafael Barba back in a courtroom, and not as the defendant.”

Barba rolled his eyes. 

And then, Judge Scaparella, whose calendar he’d landed on many times when he was an ADA, threw in her own assessment: “Mr. Barba, I’ve seen you around the courthouse a few times these last few months, didn’t realize you’d crossed over to the other side.”

“I am here to zealously defend my client, as he deserves,” Barba said.

“All right, then, let’s get to it. How do you plead, Mr. Margolis?”

“Not guilty.”

“Mr. Cutter?” the judge prompted.

“Remand.”

Barba huffed. “We have a clear argument for self-defense as it relates to a federal investigation into whether Mr. Tiposi arranged for the murder of his daughter.”

“Which wouldn’t prove self-defense even if it were true,” Cutter said.

“That can be argued in a criminal court,” Judge Scaparella told them.

“What’s relevant,” Barba said, “is that my client is pleading not guilty by reason of self defense and that there was a federal investigation into Mr. Tiposi that led Mr. Margolis to believe that if Mr. Tiposi killed his daughter, he’d surely kill his son too.”

“Victim-blame, why don’t you,” Cutter said sarcastically.

“Victim blaming, Counselor? When the decedent was being investigated for his involvement in not only the murder of his daughter but also the mafia hit that killed his wife, Mr. Margolis’s mother, in 1999?”

“Which suggests revenge, not self defense.”

“Again, save it for criminal court,” the judge said. “Bail is set at $100,000, cash or bond.”

Barba had the chance to confer privately with Paul in an isolated conference room in the courthouse before he was to be taken back to Rikers, where he’d await bail. “I’m going to get you a plea deal for three to five years,” Barba said. “Can you live with that?”

“What are my other options?”

“You’ll be put on trial for murder, possibly Murder One where the judge instructs the jury they’re allowed to convict on lesser charges. That means —”

“I know what it means. I’ve been convicted of murder before.”

“Wrongfully. I’m going to argue your wrongful conviction and your sister’s murder as mitigating circumstances. If this goes to trial, they’ll paint it as a revenge killing — vigilante justice, the DA likes to call it — and you’ll be looking at 20 years. I’ll argue mitigating circumstances and ask for time served. They won’t give me that, but they’ll offer three to five.”

Paul nodded. “I can handle that. I’ve done it before,” he said, choking up a bit.

Barba stood and patted Paul on the shoulder. “Because,” he said, lowering his voice, “Jack McCoy’s an asshole.”

Paul cracked a small smile.

“So,” Barba said, “if there’s anything you know for sure that can help me, tell me now. The COs are going to want you out of here in five minutes.” Barba sat down again and picked up his pen.

“I’ve been renting a place in Bay Ridge, where I grew up. My dad called the other night — I guess it was Thursday — to say he was coming to New York. I told him I didn’t want him staying with me until we knew for sure what happened with Amy. I think he did it. I think he set it up, I mean, and told whatever lies he had to tell to get away with it.”

“Why?”

“Look, I always knew he had money problems he hid from me and my mom. But you want to know what he told me the other day, when I stupidly agreed to go meet him at his hotel? He confessed to me that when he was 25, he was married to Amy’s mother and they were broke because he’d invested ten thousand dollars to get an — alternative social studies textbook or something — published, had bought an expensive car, couldn’t keep up with his mortgage. And it made sense. I always believed my dad was a nice guy who was dumb with money and big life decisions. I actually still believe that, a little bit.”

A CO pounded on the door so hard that the entire doorway shook. “One minute!” he shouted. “We need to be out of here by five.”

Barba flipped his middle finger in the direction of the closed door. “Unprofessional, but I have a thing about COs,” he muttered, gritting his teeth. “Go on.”

“He took a loan from some mafia guys in the early 80s. He didn’t even know, the idiot didn’t even know that was what a high-interest private loan always meant back then. When he couldn’t pay it back, they said all would be forgiven if he married my —”

“Let’s go!” the CO shouted.

“If he married my mom and kept an eye on her to see if she was still extorting the guy who thought I was his biological son. But she was never extorting anybody, and that guy, as we now know, wasn’t my biological father, Will Zadon was. And it gets — are you related to Lucia?”

“Excuse me?”

“My dad had this friend, Lucia Barba, she runs a charter school up here, and he convinced her to write a letter so that Daniel could get a job.”

“Come on!” The CO was pounding on the door again. “I’ll get PD to break this door down and arrest you too, Mr. Barba.”

“Delightful,” Barba said. 

“Tell her I’m sorry, I know she had no idea who Daniel really was, or even who my dad was.” Paul stood, and Barba stood with him. “Long story short, Dad didn’t know he was taking out a loan from the mafia, and then when he did know, he tricked my mom into marrying him so he didn’t have to pay the loan back. He was a moron, but a moron whose moron-ness endangered both his first and second wives. And his first wife, Amy’s mom, he supposedly really loved her too. As for Amy, he probably loved her up until the point that he realized she knew why he’d married my mom, and all his dreams of having a nuclear family and a house and a self-published textbook flew out the window.”

“Okay, thank you, Paul,” Barba said. “Liv will arrange for you to be bailed out. We’ll talk again in my office as soon as you are.”

He opened the door, and the CO led Paul to the van that would take him back to Rikers.

Barba was bothered by the degree to which Paul had continued to defend Neil: “he was a moron who loved his first wife” seemed awfully generous. Neil had stopped being a moron and transformed into an outright criminal the day he told his daughter’s boyfriend to drug her. Even if he’d been too stupid to figure out what his old-school organized crime buddies were going to do to Amy, he was a criminal nevertheless. Neil had lied to Braden Eglund to get him to drug Amy unconscious. The fact of his criminality was no more complicated than that. 

He sent his mother an _I love you_ text and hoped she wasn’t too racked with guilt over the letter she’d written for Daniel. At least she’d come forward; that must have been what she was discussing with Liv, the matter that she kept telling Barba was none of his business.

On his way out of the courthouse, he called Benson. “Hey,” he said, “we got $100,000 bail. Best I could do, given the circumstances. I’m on my way home.”

“I know a bail bondsman. I’ll give him a call. Mira wouldn’t have wanted him sitting in a cell for weeks, after all she did for him.”

“Do what you have to. I’ll help.”

“You’ve still got lawsuits open against you.”

“Don’t worry about it. When I threaten to sue the Manhattan DA’s office, they’ll be the ones who’ll have to settle with Mercy and the Householders.”

“Rafa,” she said, “you’re back on your game.”

“Perhaps,” he said, not quite believing that to be true.

“Are you coming by tonight?”

“I just said, I’m on my way — oh, I meant I was on my way to your place. I was going to ask if you want me to bring home — if you want me to bring dinner.”

“Of course. Noah would love a cheeseburger. And you know, you’re a very good lawyer, the best lawyer, but maybe you should put your apartment back on the market in case your plan to settle your lawsuits falls through. You can live here if you promise your pinstripes and ties and shoes won’t crowd us out.”

“They might. I have a lot of ties.”

“You’ve been sleeping here five to seven nights a week as it is.”

“And Noah?”

“Will be fine with it.”

“I’m kicking myself,” he told her as he started a one-familiar run down the courthouse steps.

“Why?”

“Thinking of all the opportunities I missed over the years to wake up next to you in the morning.”

“Smooth,” she teased.

“You know it.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“You’ll see me every morning until you’re ready to kick me out of bed.”

—

Over cheeseburgers that night, they told Noah that Uncle Rafa would be moving in soon. “You already sleep here every night,” he commented.

“And now my clothes and all my things will be here too,” Barba explained.

“Does that mean you’re getting married?” Noah asked, and both Benson and Barba answered “no,” their quick _no_ s accompanied by crimson in their cheeks.

After Noah went to bed, Barba told Benson his plan for Paul: he’d get him three to five years on account of mitigating circumstances and time served. With a promise that the information wouldn’t go beyond the apartment, he told Benson what Paul had told him about Neil’s past.

“Eames and I pieced that together … when was it? … yesterday.”

“It’s been a long 48 hours.”

They watched television in silence for at least an hour. He could read her face: what she now knew about Neil, the full picture of the circumstances surrounding Mira’s death, was breaking her heart. “I’m so tired,” she said hoarsely. “I need to go to bed.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Barba went to the bathroom to change and brush his teeth. When he returned, he found Benson laying on her side under the covers. He went over to her side of the bed and saw that her eyes were bloodshot, the circles beneath them damp with tears. She didn’t like to cry in front of anyone, even him. 

“Sweetheart,” he said, resting a hand where the comforter was pulled over her shoulder, “do you want to talk about it?”

She closed her eyes. “Can I lie and say it’s allergies?”

He returned to his side of the bed and climbed under the covers with her, embracing her from behind. She sniffled loudly. “This must be so hard on you,” he said, “all these old wounds from 19 years ago. I know how I felt with Roger, and now —”

Her eyes were still closed. “Paul shouldn’t have to serve jail time at all. They should count his five years at Ossining as time served on account of how a corrupt detective set him up.”

“That’s what I’m going to ask for, on the assumption they’ll negotiate me to to 3 to 5. There’s no real precedent for granting time served in this situation.”

Benson rolled over so that she could rest her head on Barba’s shoulder, under his jaw. “Hm,” Barba said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“That didn’t sound like nothing.”

“McCoy argued a case like that once. I should talk to him.”

“Ha.”

“Okay, look, that’s enough pillow talk,” Barba said, running his thumb across her cheekbone. “You’re technically on the prosecutorial side here.”

“I’m on Paul’s side. This, what happened with Mira, wasn’t my case.”

“Your case involves Paul’s twin brother.”

“Who he had no idea existed until a few months ago.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Fine,” she said, rolling back onto her side, facing away from him again, “no pillow talk.”

“I love you.” He kissed her cheek and she took his hand, drawing his arm around her in a tight embrace.

“Talk to me about anything else, then,” she begged. “Anything other than the Zadons or Neil or Mira.”

He felt her shallow sigh in her spine, which was pressed against his chest.

“Santiago texted me,” he said, “told me they let Carisi out of the hospital at six, a little early, so he’s finally getting a good night’s sleep. Said Carisi was a little too excited to talk shop, though.”

“Sounds like him.” 

Benson’s sighs suddenly turned into a laugh.

“What?” he asked, wondering what could have possibly been so funny about Sonny Carisi getting a good night’s sleep after talking too much.

“I had to read a lot of fan fiction for the case we are not pillow talking about.”

“And?”

“I met Santiago yesterday. He was — rightly — pissed at Carisi for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong.”

“It’s understandable. Santiago could be sanctioned by the Bar for disclosing information about a client’s family to an NYPD detective nosing around outside of his jurisdiction.”

“What I’m saying is, their relationship is starting out as adversarial, but due to extenuating circumstances, they’ll be living together for a week.”

“Oh my God, Liv,” he said with a sort of teasing exasperation.

“Forgive me if I’m painting with very broad strokes here, but if the tens of thousands of words of fan fiction I’ve read these last few months have taught me anything, it’s that they’ll be sleeping together by the end of the week and married by the end of the year.”

“Carisi’s —“

“I know. Listen, I’m a detective who has read a lot of fan fiction and I want the man who my kid calls Uncle Sonny to be happy. Can you blame me?”

“A little.”

He felt her laugh again. 

“I wouldn’t want him to hurt Santiago,” Barba explained.

“The way he hurt you.”

“Carisi has his own issues he needs to work out, but he needs to work them out before he gets involved with anybody else who’s looking for something more serious than a couple of nights together. And I can’t believe I’m taking your theory seriously, when it’s based on fan fiction.”

“If I inadvertently set them up —”

“You didn’t inadvertently set them up. You found your detective a place to stay after a head injury and a broken nose.”

“Mira told me once —”

“I thought we weren’t going to talk about the case.”

“Nothing to do with the case. _My friend_ Mira once tried to set me up with a Brooklyn detective, and I’ve never liked being “set up,” especially not then, when I was 27 or 28, one of the younger detectives on SVU. I had more important things to do. Mira told me that there’s a Jewish tradition that says anyone who successfully sets up three good marriages is guaranteed a spot in heaven.”

“And you married that detective, didn’t you?”

Benson lightly kicked Barba’s shin. “Sure. In an alternate universe, we’re celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary.” 

She paused for a few seconds to take a breath, and that breath came out as a shaky sigh. “Hm,” she said to herself, and he heard her sniffle and clear her throat.

“Liv?” he prompted.

“You know what’s funny,” she said, and he could hear her voice had gone tearful again. “Or not funny, but —”

“Tell me.”

“Mira is the reason we met.”

“Is she?”

“The first time you and I met was when I went to the bar after her funeral to see if there was anyone I could talk to, because Walker wasn’t doing enough to investigate her murder. They were focusing entirely on Paul, they were wrong, I knew it then as well as I know it now. But I walked into that bar, I saw you, and you looked like an ADA, so I sat down. And the second time I was in that bar, I was there to talk to Walker, because I thought he was just stubborn and old-fashioned, not corrupt. Both times we talked that year, I was there because of Mira.”

“Liv,” he said, pressing his forehead into her shoulder.

“I know, we said no pillow talk.”

“You’re right, though, this is different. This is about your friend, and you and me. What you’re saying is, it was because of Mira that you were there to hold my hand on the worst night of my life.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those actually concerned about this sort of thing, yes, Mira used "heaven" as shorthand for "the world to come" so she wouldn't have to give Olivia a full theological explanation while telling her about a silly/sweet piece of folk wisdom, and no, I'm not explaining theology in a fanfic. ;-)


	16. No Traveler Returns

**February 6th, 2018: 11AM**

“You’ll do fine,” Dworkin assured Barba outside the courthouse. He laid an open hand on the disgraced ADA’s back. “You’re prepped from the gray hairs on your head to the gray hairs on your … toes. Deep breaths.”

Barba nodded and threw Dworkin a brief half-hearted smile, even as the nausea lingered in his throat, even as an ice-cold sensation of unrecoverable loss filled his belly. Dworkin hurried off to a coffee cart near the subway station, and Barba, unable to stomach even coffee, walked off towards the tree-lined square near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Deep breaths. 

He wondered if Liv would show up when he took the stand. He hoped she would, because of how much his heart _needed_ her, and he hoped she wouldn’t, because he’d hurt her, he’d betrayed her by grossly overstepping his bounds with the Householders, by putting her in a position where she had to sit through his murder trial. The heartbreak on her face was enough proof that no matter what happened, he was condemned.

“Rafi!”

He sucked in a quick breath at the echo of the childhood nickname that he rarely heard anymore. Turning slowly, he spotted Yelina Muñoz behind him. She was smiling sadly, and looked like she wanted to hug him but knew better.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“You didn’t answer our calls. We’re worried about you.”

He raised an eyebrow. Alex had been out of prison for two years, and had not made a single call to his onetime friend before the trial started. He was running for state senate again, to get his old seat back, and he had a good chance if he made it through the September primaries.

“Please.” She grasped his arms through his coat. “What can we do? To protect you while you’re inside, to help reduce your sentence, anything.”

“Yelina,” he said, blinking furiously, “the verdict hasn’t even come down yet.”

“No, no, I didn’t meant it like that. There’s a good chance they’ll find you not guilty, right?”

“Depends on how I do on the stand today. Whatever this. Is really about, I don’t have the time or the strength for it.”

“We were worried.”

“Alejandro was worried about me. Sure.”

“He knew you had trouble with the COs union a few years ago.”

Eddie had already asked him what he could do to keep the COs off his back. So, all his close friends from his youth — and his mother — were convinced he was going to jail.

“At this point,” Barba told Yelina, “it’s probably best that we all forget we ever knew each other.”

“What a thing to say.”

“It’s true.”

“Have you … no, forget it. Good luck today. I’ll say a prayer. You’ve got this, Rafi, I’m sure.”

“Have I what?” he asked, sharpening his voice. “What are you trying to tell me?”

She looked up at the trees for a moment, swallowing a lump in her throat. “Have you heard from Roger Deimant lately?”

“Not in about ten years — no, that’s wrong, he called me when my grandmother died — why?”

“I was just wondering if he knew.”

“I’m sure our old Brooklyn connections have already told him — why, though? Why would you ask that? What are you trying to pull?”

“Nothing, I swear to you, I’m not pulling anything.” She held on to the sleeves of his coat. “I swear. Alex heard through mutual friends that Roger has a bad heart. You might want to call him.”

“Roger y yo, no somos de tu incumbencia, okay? Not now, not ever. And if he indeed has a bad heart, I’m the last person he needs to hear from.”

_I’m the Baby Killer ADA_ , he remembered, noticing the newsstands in the distance, _I’ve broken enough hearts already._

“I’m sorry, Rafi.”

“I’ve got to go testify,” he said, patting her arm before he walked away.

Dworkin did a good job. But when Stone had him all to himself on the witness stand, he badgered him, demanding _do you feel guilty?_ , and the judge did nothing to intervene. He admitted to _feeling guilty_ about what he’d done, how he’d interfered, how horrifically he’d overstepped the ethical bounds of his job, his ethical boundaries as a person in general. 

“We’re at fifty-fifty now,” Dworkin said after the judge called recess for the day. “Do you want to talk about a plea?”

Barba shook his head.

“Good. You shouldn’t do any time, especially not when McCoy and that asshole special prosecutor are grandstanding the hell out of your future.”

He went back to his apartment, which was partially packed up in anticipation of a guilty verdict, and grabbed a few toiletries and articles of clothing. Liv, who’d sat through his testimony, who was visibly shaken, _angry_ , had asked him to stay with her instead of in his half-packed apartment. He obliged, but worried about what effects the aftermath of his momentary lapse in ethics, in character, had on her. He didn’t deserve her, and she didn’t need him, he was sure.

**February 6th, 2018: 9:30PM**

She put Noah to bed almost an hour late because he wanted Uncle Rafa to read him a story, and then two more, and she couldn’t tell him no, not tonight. Noah was smart enough, and nosy enough, to know exactly what was happening.

When she tiptoed out of Noah’s room, she found Barba hunched over at the kitchen counter, an untouched tumbler of scotch in front of him. One hand covered his eyes. His face was red, all the muscles in it clenched tight. He was sobbing silently.

Her heart broke for him a thousand times over.

“Rafa,” she said, hurrying over to him, throwing her arms around him. “Rafa, Rafa, look at me, it’s going to be okay.”

He cried into her shoulder and collarbone while she held him, comforted him. It took him two more minutes to be able to breathe normally enough to say, “Fifty-fifty I’m found guilty and sentenced to two to three years. I won’t survive that long in there. Time served in New York is a literal death sentence for me, and no one wants to acknowledge that.”

“We’ll appeal. You’ll appeal, I mean. This is cruel, what McCoy’s done to you. Absolutely cruel.”

His eyes were red but relatively dry, and his face had gone pale again, with no tearstains on his cheeks. “The COs,” he said, choking on the phrase.

“We’ll keep them in check, I promise.” She continued holding him to her. “But you won’t go to jail for this, you can’t.”

“Liv,” he said, clutching desperately at her hand, his eyes pleading with hers. What he wouldn’t say: _I’m terrified._

“I know,” she said gently. “Let’s sit down.”

Barba followed her to the couch. He was shaking, pale, as if all the blood in his veins had run cold. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I put you in a position where you felt you had to fix a horrendous error in judgment that I made.”

She kissed his cheek, close to his ear. “I know why you did what you did. I’ll never understand it, but I know.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

She pet the back of his neck, near his hairline. “I love you.”

“I love you too, always, I never — I never wanted to hurt you, or our colleagues, or my friends, or my mother, or —”

“Not now,” she said. She moved her hand lower, to his back. “I’m here.”

His face crumpled, shattered really, and large tears finally started to run down his cheeks. He was still fighting the impulse to cry, even as his body betrayed him; his shoulders shook.

She held him.

With his head on her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her from the side, she slid a hand up the long-sleeved polo he’d changed into when he’d briefly returned to his place after testifying. She ran her hand across his belly and splayed it over his heart.

It was the most intimate they’d ever been, including the night a few weeks back when they’d kissed and briefly, if facetiously, considered heading into the bedroom and establishing good grounds for a mistrial for Mariel McLaughlin.

“You are a good man,” she said.

He closed his eyes. “I tried,” he told her, his voice breaking again.

**February 14th, 2018: 11AM**

Fin took a phone call at his desk and his face immediately went sour. “Everything okay?” Benson asked as she walked by.

“Yeah,” he said, standing. He lowered his voice. “Everything okay with you?”

“I’m fine,” she said sharply.

“If you need to take a couple days —”

“I’m fine,” she repeated.

Rollins came in to her office ten minutes later with a similar question, and Benson gave a similarly abrupt answer. She sat at the edge of Benson’s desk and flashed her a sympathetic smile. “If you need a friend,” she said, “or just somebody to throw coffee mugs at the wall with, I’m here for you.”

“Thanks, Amanda.”

Crushed as she was, she really did appreciate the gesture, the degree to which Rollins’s offer to throw coffee mugs at the wall reflected precisely what she was feeling.

Carisi was next, and Carisi was clearly pissed off about a hundred things at once, given the way his jaw shifted and his eyes were focused on the wall behind Benson. “Daniel Zadon’s going back to arraignment court,” he told her.

Benson blinked, her eyelids heavy. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t on my radar. What’s going on?”

“His uncle knows judges and people in the DA’s office, that’s what’s going on. If they ROR him and hand him back his passport, my case is screwed.”

“Wait,” she said, “who’s the ADA on the new arraignment?”

“Stone,” Carisi said, spitting out the name.

“I thought he was going back to Chicago.”

Carisi’s face fell. He sat in one of the chairs opposite Benson’s desk and clasped his hand. “Goddamn it,” he said, “nobody told you, which means I’ve got to be the one —”

“No,” she groaned, guessing what would come next.

“I only know this ‘cause of the case. McCoy probably wanted to wait a couple more days before he told you, so you wouldn’t, I don’t know, kneecap him.”

She was hurt, but she tried to remind herself that this — McCoy’s decision to replace Barba with the man who’d (over)prosecuted him to tears on the witness stand just over a week ago — was just one more thing, just one more insult to her heart.


	17. Opportunity

When Benson was called down to One Police Plaza on an unreasonably humid morning in early August, her first thought was that Dodds was going to take her and her squad off the Daniel Zadon case because of the two degrees of separation between Daniel and Mira Margolis. 

Carisi’s interference in Miami hadn’t helped much either, but IAB had let him off with a one week suspension and a warning.

Dodds’s decision would have made sense procedurally on some level — Paul Margolis was Daniel’s twin brother, after all, and Barba was Paul’s defense attorney — but it didn’t make sense for Will’s daughters, who were now well beyond the statute of limitations, and it didn’t make sense for Daniel’s other victims, especially the most recent ones at the day school.

Benson and Carisi were convinced that there were others.

Taking SVU off the case didn’t make sense in light of the survivors who needed justice, who had suffered because of Will and Cordelia’s decision to prioritize Daniel and a criminal organization over the safety of children and adolescents.

The feds, and Eames’s task force, were happy: they had Walker and everyone in his web, and also everyone in the web in which Walker himself had been caught. They had, technically, the late Neil Tiposi too, on his participation in the larger criminal scheme. But the Zadon sisters, and the day school victims, and Laura Perez, and Amy Rankin, none of them was a part of the big picture, so they’d fallen by the wayside.

Benson was surprised when Dodds greeted her in his office with “Good morning, Captain Benson.”

“Captain Dodds,” she said, struggling not to get her hopes up.

“I want to talk to you about a promotion.” He paused for a moment before he said, “You’ve done good work with Alex Eames. She speaks highly of you. The brass and I would like to free you up to head similar task forces, where sexual assaults are involved, to ensure that the feds don’t lose sight of those crimes when we hand cases over to them. You’ll still be working with SVU, but in all five boroughs, and you’ll be a liaison between them and the feds in these types of cases.”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“And you’d be in a position to advocate for funding across-the-board rape kit testing in other states, which you have experience in.”

“Yes.”

“Are you agreeing to take the position or are you agreeing that you have the necessary experience?”

“Yes,” she said, a broad smile on her lips. “When does the new position start?”

“The second week of January. Gives us some time to transition you out of your current role. Until then, though, the feds said Daniel Zadon’s all yours, if you can find him.”

“They’re only saying that because they can’t find him.”

Outside 1PP, she rushed to call Barba. She’d figure out how to break the news to the squad later; at least her departure wouldn’t be abrupt, and she’d still work with them on a lot of cases. She wasn’t disappearing from their lives.

If the new position had required her to abruptly disappear from her squad’s lives, she wouldn’t have taken it. She’d had that happen with too many friends and lovers, like Cabot and Cassidy, whose infrequent reappearances in her life were generally shattering, Tucker (though some of that was her own fault), Stabler, Amaro, Novak, and most recently, Barba (almost). She’d never to that to anyone else.

Unless they were, say, Sheila Porter. 

She’d gladly disappear from Sheila Porter’s life in a split second, if she could go back in time two years. 

All right, so there were some exceptions, some nuance to the idea of disappearing from someone’s life.

Lucia Barba, wracked with guilt, probably should have left Neil Tiposi in the dust, too, long before he’d convinced her to write the glowing letter of recommendation for Daniel that she and Eames now had copies of. 

Benson called Barba at his office to tell him about the promotion, and he congratulated her without flinching. He sounded genuinely thrilled, and promised they’d celebrate later that night.

—

“Come January, I’m done,” McCoy said, pulling a book off the high shelf behind his desk. “Now, you are aware that I was the prosecutor on this case, so I came at it from a very different angle.”

“Yes,” Barba said, a smirk reflexively forming on his lips, “but you lost, and inadvertently made new caselaw.”

McCoy raised an eyebrow. “I should be talking to you about anything other than a plea.”

“We are talking about a plea,” Barba said. “Time served or a suspended sentence. My client and I would accept either.”

“Rafael, you’re lucky you —”

“I’m lucky I _what_?” 

“You’re lucky.”

“Not on account of anything this office ever did for me, or to me.” He rapped his knuckles on the monitor of McCoy’s desktop computer. “There are at least three databases on here you can use in place of those doorstop law books, you know.”

“I know.” McCoy dog-eared the page he was looking for and passed the book to Barba. “Show that to Cutter, see what he says.”

“I could reasonably argue for a suspended sentence on these grounds,” Barba said, his eyes skimming the page in front of him. 

McCoy shrugged. “Your call, you’re the defense.”

Barba took a picture of the first page with his phone. “I’ll cross-check it on Westlaw when I get home, and I’ll have a brief on your EADA’s desk in the morning. Mr. Margolis already served five years on a wrongful conviction, on a frame-up by a corrupt NYPD detective. You and I both know this was not premeditated, not revenge. Maybe don’t indict the ham sandwich this time, Jack.”

“He’s already been —”

“I’m speaking figuratively.”

“And if the mayor, or the people I represent, don’t like Margolis walking away with no jail time?”

Barba bit the inside of his cheek and stared at his former boss.

“You and Cutter work it out,” McCoy said resignedly.

“We will.” That would have been a good time to say _thank you, Jack_ , but Barba didn’t think it appropriate to ever thank McCoy for anything again. “See you around, then.”

“Rafael,” he said as the defense attorney was on his way out the door, “Cutter tells me you’ve made some solid arguments on Mr. Margolis’s behalf.”

“That’s my job.”

“I want to say —”

“Please don’t.”

“I understand it’s too little, too late for apologies. I wanted to say you’ve clearly found a new niche that suits you. Run with it.”

_Bullshit_ , Barba thought to himself as he headed out of the building he’d worked in for six years, the job he’d worked — the work he’d loved — for twenty-one.

—

“Bullshit.”

“Rafael,” Lucia snapped, “no maldigas con tu — el niño — aquí.”

“Mi —?” he prompted, laughing off the awkwardness of Lucia’s slip of the tongue. Noah was setting up a prison complex for his stuffed animals (they were going to have to have a talk about that at some point) on a rainy Saturday afternoon while Benson attended her first all-day seminar in preparation for the city-federal task force job she’d start in January. Lucia had begged her son to let her come over so she could deliver her mother’s ring.

“Mami,” he said when Lucia slipped the ring to him, “no estoy listo. Ella tampoco. I’ve only been back for five months.” He clutched the piece of jewelry, strategizing where to hide it in the apartment he’d recently moved in to.

“I thought you two were years in the making.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“You talked about your bickering five years ago. I knew it before you did.”

“Oh … oh.” He squeezed his hand shut to protect the ring, pressing it into his palm. “That makes sense.”

“What’d you think I meant?”

“Nothing. That.”

“So, as I was saying, Yelina’s been trying to reach you.”

“Don’t tell her anything,” Barba warned.

“I don’t.”

“Don’t trust her, whatever she tells you.”

“Rafi, that’s not right.”

“Please. You saw how she stood by Alex, through all the corruption, through all the —”

“If you had been willing to overlook that, not forever, just for a few years, he’d have been the best mayor New York City ever had.”

“Come on, Mami,” he said, leading her towards the kitchen so they could put some distance between themselves and Noah, “you don’t mean that.”

“I do. It was Alex’s destiny to be mayor of this city, and I believe —”

“Don’t you dare finish that thought.”

“Fine,” she said, throwing up her arms, “I won’t finish it.”

She was going to say _I believe you screwed up Alex’s destiny and that’s why yours got screwed up too._

He rubbed his eyes, indulging for a moment in grief over the fact that he’d never be The Honorable Rafael Barba. Maybe Lucia was right.

No, of course Lucia wasn’t right. Alex was an asshole.

A charismatic asshole who led his family and friends and constituents to believe that he should have been the mayor of New York City. 

_Hizzoner_ was the term the local papers had used for mayors for the last five decades, at least. _Hizzoner_ , a corruption of “His Honor.”

“So, what’s this Yelina’s trying to tell you?”

“She swears up and down she’s leaving Alex.”

“You didn’t tell her anything about your involvement with the Zadon case, with Tiposi, did you?” he asked, suddenly alarmed.

“No, nobody except you and Olivia and the detective — the skinny one with the hair — knows.”

“Good,” he said, recalling that Yelina had cryptically brought up Roger Deimant back in February, before Barba had any clue about what Roger had done, about his connection to the murder of Benson’s friend.

Yelina might have known that Roger was corrupt. But how?

His heart raced at the thought that his and Benson’s lives had been so intertwined for twenty years, to a degree that made him for split seconds believe in fate, or some version of it.

Before Benson returned home, Barba zipped the ring into the inside pocket of a puffy winter coat he rarely wore, that now lived in a hallway closet in Benson’s apartment, because his own apartment was back on the market just in case he couldn’t sue the DA’s office as a means of settling the suits filed against him by the Householders and Mercy Hospital. 

And so he could wake up with Olivia every morning.

He’d ask her. He would. But as much as it had been twenty years, it had really only been five months.

Six months since he broke her heart.

They could get past that, but the problem was, he promised himself when he was a young man in his early twenties that he’d never have kids. He was afraid. His own childhood, and later, the decisions he had to make for his father, weighed too heavily on him.

When he saw disappointment and fear in Olivia’s eyes the day after he was arrested and ror’ed for his interference in the Householder case — it was the fear, mostly, that bothered him, the fact that she was still compelled to _fix this_ despite his having made her afraid — he knew he wasn’t worthy of her love, that he would only drag her down.

But he’d made it worse by leaving.

He’d broken her heart, over and over, with the shards of his own broken heart.

They would work through this, him and Liv. Rafioli was twenty years in the making, after all, somebody’s version of destiny. But he’d never forgive himself if he broke Noah’s heart.

_No maldigas con tu hijo aquí,_ he was sure Lucia wanted to say.


	18. Disclosure

“Breakfast’s on me,” Benson told Carisi as they sat in a booth at a diner a few blocks from the precinct. He was back at work after the incident in Miami, and Benson wanted to talk to him about Daniel Zadon and both their futures at SVU.

“You know what I won’t be ordering,” Carisi said with a nervous laugh.

“Bacon, egg, and cheese?” Benson guessed.

“I almost feel bad for the guy, you know, just wanted attention on YouTube, got roped into the scheme that got his girlfriend killed.”

“I don’t feel bad for him at all,” Benson said. “He put one of my best detectives in the hospital.”

“Uh-oh. What’re you buttering me up for, Lieu?”

“I — wait, speaking of butter, let’s order.” A waitress took their orders before Benson continued. “As of January, I am no longer commanding officer at SVU.”

“What?” He clinked his coffee cup against the saucer beneath it. “You’re not retiring, Lieu, come on now.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’ve accepted a new position, similar to Alex Eames’s, but I’ll be making sure the feds don’t overlook sexual assaults that are part of larger cases. The Zadon case made it clear to me that we need someone in that role. We’ll still work together a few times a year.”

“Congratulations. Thanks for breaking it to me gently, with home fries.”

“Listen, I want to talk to you about something else.” She felt Carisi’s leg bounce up and down under the table and wanted to say _not that_ , but she refrained. “You’re a detective first-grade with a law degree and you passed the bar on your first try. That’s an unusual combination. The sergeant’s exam is being offered in a few months. You should take it.”

“Why?” he asked, almost suspicious.

“The plan for now if for Fin to take over SVU for a year or two as an interim sergeant, like I did before I was promoted. But Fin’s 60, with a long career in NYPD. He’s out in four years no matter what, but he’s planning to retire by 2020.”

The waitress came back with their plates. Carisi was smiling. “Are you, the leader who wanted me off your squad within an hour of meeting me, saying I should fast-track it to commanding officer?”

“Nice work, Detective.”

“Me?” He laughed and looked up at the waitress. “I had a really stupid mustache when I started working for her.”

Benson nodded. “He did.”

“Can I get you anything else?” the bemused waitress asked.

“No,” Benson said, “we’re good.”

When the waitress returned to the counter, Benson added, “The first time you told me why you’d rather work SVU than homicide, I knew you’d do well here. I’ve spoken to Dodds about it. He’ll have to get IAB on board after your little expedition last month, but I think you should give it a shot.”

“On account of my law degree, really?”

“NYPD needs more Carisis.”

He rolled his eyes, but she could see from his smile and the way he looked down a little sheepishly at his plate that he was flattered. 

“When Eglund was slamming my head into that wall,” he told her, “I was thinking, _goodbye career_ , and not because of the injury, but because of what you, and Dodds, and IAB were going to think of what I did.”

“How’s your nose?” she asked.

“Had another X-ray last week. It’s healing on its own. No plastic surgery. I can still be an opera singer.”

“Good for you,” she said, raising her glass of ice water in Carisi’s direction. “You sing opera, Carisi?”

“Nope. My sisters say it should be illegal for me to sing along with the car radio.”

“And your brain? How’s that doing?”

“Still doing what it’s supposed to.”

“Good. As your supervisor, I was angry you’d gone rogue and almost killed the case, but as your friend, I was worried.”

“I’m fine. Being wide awake in ICU was a little terrifying, given what you’re seeing, but I’m fine.”

“Everything all right at Santiago Garcia’s Home for Sad Lawyers?” 

_Shut up, Liv_ , she tried to tell herself. _Don’t push. You always push._

Even with Stone, who was hardly worth her time of day, she always caught herself pushing, offering him her ear and her compassion if he needed it.

“Thank you for finding me a place to stay,” was all Carisi said.

“Any time. Strange luck, right? Barba’s friend’s cousin was one of Amy Rankin’s lawyers.”

“To be honest, Lieu, I still don’t believe all of that’s luck, or chance, or whatever. I think Tiposi went to that firm on purpose. Santiago’s thinking along the same lines.”

“Because of Laura Perez?”

“No, because Santiago knew Barba. That’s why Neil might have gone to him, or why somebody might have told him to go to him.”

“Barba?” she said, unable to contain her alarm. “Why?”

“Santiago told me some things. Look, Barba’s your — significant other — now, right? So I’m sure you don’t want to hear about his past romantic entanglements.” Carisi cringed, as if he’d recognized precisely how deep a hole he was digging himself, and quickly specified, “with Yelina Muñoz.”

“I knew about that.”

“You don’t know the extent of it. Santiago thinks Will Zadon might have helped Alex Muñoz cover cover up an indiscretion, an early one, when he was first running for state senate, and Alex, kind of like Tiposi, missed that there was a mob connection involved. I just wonder what Alex had to do in return, why none of that came out during your or the feds’ initial investigation.”

“This is between us, but Rafa said that Yelina talked to him during his trial, and tried to get in touch with him again recently.”

“I don’t think Tiposi cared whether or not his daughter had to do jail time. He loved her in his own way, but he only loved her up until the point her online activities risked exposing his scheme, why he married Mira. Misplaced priorities, like you’re always saying. I think Walker might have sent him to Santiago, specifically — remember, this was last year, when Barba still worked for the DA, with us — so he had an excuse to figure out, through Eddie Garcia’s cousin, how much Eddie and Barba knew about Alex Muñoz’s connection to the Zadons.”

Benson groaned.

“Barba’s safe, though,” Carisi pointed out, “because it turns out he didn’t know shit about the Zadons.”

“So we’re back to dumb luck.” Benson took a long, slow sip of lukewarm coffee. “Where the hell is Daniel?”

“No idea.” Carisi’s leg was bouncing up and down again. “Santiago has no idea either, and I know there’s a conflict of interest, but he says we should look at the Muñozes.”

“Would explain why Yelina was trying to reach Rafa. But there’s no real conflict of interest, just a whole lot of dumb luck.”

When she looked across at him, the frozen expression on his face told her that her theory, which was based merely on hours and hours of reading procedural-drama fanfiction, was correct.

Carisi did great undercover work, and yet, when he had romantic troubles, you could always read them right there on his face. Rollins had told her the story about West Virginia one night, how Carisi had a little crush on her and had been clearly jealous, clearly disappointed when the crush didn’t pan out as he’d expected it to, and Carisi couldn’t hide his disappointment for the life of him.

“No,” he said, “there’s another conflict of interest, but I can’t disclose it.”

“What about to me? Tell me, and we’ll work from there. As long as no one’s getting hurt, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“I, uh, I have different attractions at different points in my life, is the only way I know how to describe it, and, yeah, I may have created a big conflict of interest, but it’ll be fine as long as —”

“Sonny, it’s okay.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I promise.”

“I’m disclosing a conflict of interest that won’t continue to be one.”

“You don’t look too happy about the fact that the conflict of interest isn’t going to continue,” she said, wondering if he knew how he’d hurt Barba’s rebounding heart years ago.

“I don’t know. I shouldn’t still be this — torn up about these things — at my age. I only knew him a week, anyway.”

“But you’ve been talking since then?” 

“Yeah. He calls.”

“He _calls_ ,” she emphasized.

“Just to share his thoughts about the Rankin case, mostly.”

“At least one of you caught feelings,” she couldn’t help teasing. Carisi seemed to have relaxed a bit.

“I don’t — look, I’m old and —”

That made her laugh. “I’m twelve years older than you. Don’t you dare call yourself old.”

“What I mean is, we’ve seen a lot, you and me and Fin and Rollins, and I know I’m doing a huge disservice to a whole bunch of young people by not just saying, “hey, _I’m this_ , or _I’m that_ , whatever you want to call it. There’s certain things I don’t talk about, certain sides of myself I don’t feel comfortable addressing because every time I do I get shut down, all right?”

“Yes,” she said, “all right. You have whatever conversations you’re comfortable with.”

He lowered his voice. “So you really want a closeted bisexual dumbass whose got a big problem with sleeping with conflicts of interest to head up SVU?”

“Am I the first person you’ve been able to call yourself a dumbass with?”

“You are.” A full, dopey grin spread across his face. 

“Only difference between us is a closet and a JD, really.” 

She was relieved when Carisi laughed again. “Had a girlfriend for more than a year, figured I should broach the topic, every time I tried she’d shut me down by complaining really loudly about an ex-boyfriend who allegedly left her for another man. And don’t get me started on my sisters. It’s irresponsible of me, but I can’t do it. I’m kind of glad to have you around, I’ve got to admit. But all that’s besides the point. We’ve got to find Daniel and bring him to justice. And Laura, she can =-”

“Come home,” Benson said, now whispering for real.

“Yes,” Carisi said, “yes, that’d be —” He trailed off, his eyes on the glass door up front. “Speaking of incredible dumb luck, is that Yelina Muñoz?”

Benson turned around and saw Yelina coming towards her. “Lieutenant Benson,” she said, “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“How did you find me here?”

“I waited. I didn’t want your squad to see me, but I couldn’t get you alone, so —”

“I’ll take my breakfast to the counter,” Carisi said. Benson appreciated the gesture. Although she could certainly hold her own with a disgraced politician’s wife in a public space, Carisi probably recognized that her own dumb luck had led to her being taken hostage at least once every three years, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

“This’ll be quick,” Yelina said as she took Carisi’s place opposite Benson.

“Quick,” Benson repeated.

“I’ve filed for divorce.”

“Mm-hmm. Rafael tells me you’ve been looking to talk to him.”

Yelina folded her arms on the table. “He probably doesn’t believe you about the divorce.”

“Oh, no, he believes it,” Benson said. “He believes you’re getting divorced to protect financial assets in case your husband goes back to jail. Alex is still in the running for the Democratic primaries for state senate, last I heard. Why the worry?”

“Alex thinks we’re getting divorced for financial reasons, but as soon as it’s all over and done with, I’m not remarrying him. We’re over, and he’ll be lucky if he gets anything more than supervised visitations with the girls.”

“And you’re telling me this because …?”

“First of all, there’s an island near Aruba where Will Zadon had a house that he could launder his and everybody else’s money through. Ask Walker, he knows exactly where it is.”

She made a mental note to get in touch with Eames. Walker was in a federal prison, and “an island near Aruba” was definitely not NYPD jurisdiction.

“And while your’e chatting with Captain Walker,” Yelina continued, “ask him who killed Mira Margolis.”

“Walker killed Mira Margolis.”

“Walker arranged for her murder. That 80s mobster asshole went right to Walker because he was convinced Mira had kidnapped his son. But ask Walker who _he_ went to in order to get the job done. Ask Walker what up-and-coming young politician sought his help in concealing from his fiancee and the voters that he’d been sleeping with a high school junior.”


	19. Repetition

Olivia Benson had been held hostage four times, five if you counted an undercover operation gone horrifically wrong. She’d had best friends completely vanish from her life three times. On four separate occasions, DNA evidence had linked her, a friend, or a family member to a crime she was already investigating. She’d learned to accept that there was nothing she could do about those patently ridiculous, uncannily repetitive problems. 

But she’d never expected to have to break the news to Barba _twice_ that his childhood friend Alex Muñoz was an awful, corrupt man.

She remembered that evening more than five years ago when Rollins set up a honey trap on a laptop in the conference room, and Muñoz, or rather Enrique Trouble, immediately sent her a photo of what Fin called “the full Muñoz,” and he and Rollins and Amaro were cringing and laughing, but Benson didn’t laugh because she saw the heartbreak on Barba’s face.

She remembered sitting with him in a bar the afternoon Muñoz dropped out of the mayoral race, when she looked at Barba and thought, this is a guy who’s been betrayed more than once.

So here they were.

Again.

Nothing was going to go down until she met with Eames in the morning anyway, so she held off. She procrastinated.

He must have known something was wrong, because she took a shower before bed, which she usually only did when she needed to wash off the residues of a bad day.

“What happened, querida?” he asked, kissing away stray water droplets off her neck as she unwrapped her towel in the bedroom.

“You don’t want to know,” she said, turning around so she could cradle the side of his face in her hand.

“That bad?” His expression suddenly turned fearful. “Not Laura, I hope.”

“No,” she said, holding him even though she had nothing on and her hair was still damp. “No news on that front yet.”

Relief washed over him, and she felt terrible knowing that his sense of relief wouldn’t last. She kissed a path up the side of his neck. “What’re you in the mood for?” she asked, her voice low. 

He was going to be _furious_ when he found out she’d known about Muñoz’s involvement with Mira Margolis’s murder for the better part of the day.

Then again, she was trying to protect him, if only for a little while. And if that made him furious, she’d just have to remind him of the time in February he broke her heart while trying to protect her feelings.

“Olivia,” he said, a gorgeous moan into her ear, “here I am trying to get you dripping wet” — he popped all the _p_ s and _t_ s as he re-punctuated each word by tonguing her skin — “and you look like you’re having an argument with yourself.”

“I am,” she told him, tugging at his boxers as he rubbed firm circles against her with his thumb, a smirk on his face, “but I’ll stop.”

He must have thought she’d had a terrible day that had nothing to do with him, because he sat on the bed, pulled her into his lap, and continued his ministrations with his hand as he mouthed at her breasts, focused, attentive.

When he brought her to orgasm writhing against his hand, he moaned something in Spanish, a series of phrases too filthy for her to understand. She sank down onto him, forgetting all that had been on her mind as she came a second time, minutes later, him following soon after with grunts of “so good … so good” followed by an aberrant “Olivia, marry me, Olivia, please.”

She almost laughed. 

She’d had lovers who cried out bizarre things in the heat of the moment — not limited to, but in particular Brian Cassidy — but “marry me” was a new one.

_Marry me._

Not now, Rafa, she thought, not when you’re about to have your heart broken again.

And she had to do it. She had to tell him before he heard it on the news.

He returned from the bathroom in only his boxers, his chest still dappled with sweat. She laid under the covers, idly naked, unusual for her, prompting a grin from him. 

“Sorry,” he whispered, curling up next to her.

“Tonight you have nothing to be sorry for.”

“What’s going on, Liv?” he asked, a hint of alarm creeping into his voice.

“About the, um, issue you just brought up now, can we give that one a little more time?”

“Yes,” he said, holding her tight, “yes, of course.”

“It was on your mind?”

“Take as much time as you need. Forever is fine too, as long as you’re here. You’re here, I’m here, that’s what counts, right?”

“I know about the ring,” she confessed.

“How?”

“Noah’s my son. He hears everything. Nothing escapes him.”

Barba drew in a breath. “When my mother was here, that’s when … we were talking mostly in Spanish, but … huh. Smart kid.”

She ran a hand up and down his arm. “I’m not saying no,” she said, kissing his shoulder. “I’m saying _wait_. Some shit is about to hit the fan, as they say, hard.”

He rolled over so he was facing her. “Regarding …?”

“Alex Muñoz.”

Barba closed his eyes; she saw his lids flutter. “What now?”

“Yelina was trying to get in touch with you.”

“I know, for the last few weeks. She says she’s leaving Alex. I assume he’s about to be arrested again and the divorce is about protecting financial assets.”

“Yes and no,” was Benson’s answer.

Barba, now laying flat on his back, pinched the bridge of his nose. “What does that mean?”

“Yes, he’s about to be arrested again, and no, the divorce is probably for real.”

“Another high school student?”

“Yes.” She didn’t want to go further, but she had to, because it was better he find out from her than the news, better he know now than think she’d kept something important from him.

She stood and sauntered over to the dresser, pulling on a tank top and pajama shorts. He stared up at the ceiling, not moving.

“You’d think after three years in prison —”

“Rafa. This is about something that happened twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years ago.” The words came out in a single exhalation as he sat up. “The only crimes with that long a statute of limitations are murder and kidnapping.”

“Right.” She sat on the bed and looked into his eyes, hoping she’d be able to offer some comfort, somehow. “This is bad, okay? You need to brace yourself.”

“Eddie told me last year that he suspected the situation with Alex was even worse than we knew. He said Alex might have been a generally good guy until we were in our mid-twenties, right around the time he and — what Eddie basically said was that Alex was in deeper shit than all the charges against him suggested.”

“Walker got 20 to life on Mira’s murder. Plea deal. He won’t live to see the 20, probably, but the only reason it and a few other promises were on the table —”

“Walker? Why are we talking about Walker?”

“Because,” she said, her heart pounding in her ribcage, “as Eames’s second-in-command confirmed earlier this evening, Walker covered up Alex’s involvement with a high school junior back in 1998, when he was the youngest city council member and already a mayoral hopeful. The girl was pregnant. Parents tried to press charges, Walker made it all go away. Yelina very likely only found out seven months ago, less even, when Daniel was first charged.”

“That’s why she came to me during my trial.”

“Yes. Probably. The senior detective on Eames’s team said there had been rumors going around for a long time, but none of us knew, and Yelina probably didn’t know until the Zadons wound up in the news. A concerned party probably tipped her off for her and the girls’ sake, in case any of these old-school mafia types were still hanging around. Listen, Rafa, here’s the thing, from what I heard from Yelina this morning, and from Eames’s team a few hours ago, Alex thought at the time that he owed Walker money, or political favors, for what Walker had done for him. That wasn’t the debt he owed.”

“Murder,” Barba said hoarsely.

“Walker and the mobster calling the shots didn’t want Mira’s murder to look like a professional hit. He wanted it to look messy. Muñoz owed him.”

“He was a murderer,” Barba said flatly, staring at the wall in front of him.

“If it helps, he stepped into what Tiposi stepped into, where he didn’t realize the depth of what he owed them.”

“Alex is smart, wickedly smart. We always said he was the brains in our friendship.”

“Wickedly smart people make mistakes when they’re desperate to cover up statutory rape.”

“My God,” Barba said, “after he murdered Mira, he must have been _gone_. He must have known after that he was irrevocably corrupt, no way out, so the rest of the corruption, the rest of the lies, came naturally.”

“He could have stopped it at any time.”

“And been killed?”

“Ask your client who spent five years in prison on a wrongful conviction for Mira’s murder.” She reached out, rubbing a hand up and down Barba’s back, along his spinal column. “I’m sorry, Rafa. I’m sorry this is how it turned out.”

He was silent for at least minute. Maybe he was willing himself not to cry, or not to throw something across the room in anger, or leave. He just stared, and she kept rubbing his back.

“Querida,” he said, choking on the endearment, “I love you.”

“Same,” she said with a sad smile.

“When will he be arrested?”

“I won’t know for sure until I talk to Eames tomorrow.”

“I’ll keep my mouth shut, but —”

“I’m sure Alex knows what’s coming. Yelina is making it look like she’s divorcing him so they can protect their assets, but if he’s convicted, she’s gone for good.”

“A family court judge might call that fraud. She needs to be careful.”

“She needs to do what she has to do to make sure she and her daughters are protected if Alex turns vindictive on her.”

“Can I tell Eddie?”

“Eddie. No one else.”

“No one else,” he repeated, rubbing his eyes. “Lucia can find out from the Daily News headline.”

“You said Yelina tried to tell you about Roger before you testified.”

“Yes. Why?”

“I wonder if that’s when Roger started telling people.”

“Because Will Zadon was still out there and Roger was dying?”

“I wonder.”

“He was a good person,” Barba said.

“Who?”

“Roger. He was a good person sucked into some corrupt cop shit. Alex … not so much.”

“Are you rationalizing?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Liv.” He drew her into his arms. “Mami says I screwed up Alex’s destiny five years ago, and that’s why —”

“Oh, no, don’t think like that.”

“I’m not. I’m far too old for that line of thinking.”

“What you did with the Householders didn’t come out of what happened with Alex, I know that much.”

“No,” he said, drawing out the syllable. “Lucia knows that too.”

“Rafa, I’m here,” was all she could say. “I’m here. Always.”

He reached over to kiss her. “I promise the same. I won’t leave again unless you kick me out.”

“You don’t have to make that promise.”

“I do, believe me, I owe it to you a thousand times over.”

“Let’s sleep on it,” she said, “all of it.”

He nodded, with a tragic frown she’d only caught a few other times on his face.

“I know this doesn’t mean much,” she said, “but to me, in my heart, you’ll always be The Honorable Rafael Barba.”

Now he smiled, just a flash of a smile, tears welling up in his eyes. “I’m not,” he said, “but you believing that means everything.”

“You are an honorable man,” she insisted, though she could see him, practically _hear_ him questioning how much of a difference there was between him and Roger, him and Tiposi, him and Alex, even.

He held her as they both drifted off to sleep.

—

Alex Muñoz was picked up by the feds the next afternoon. Eames told Benson that Muñoz’s lawyer was already spreading rumors that Walker had named Muñoz on account of his connection to Rafael Barba, through Roger Deimant. His lawyer was trying to plant seeds of reasonable doubt in a potential jury pool, opening up the possibility that Roger was the one who’d pulled the trigger on Mira all those years ago.

“Revenge from Rafael Barba, who’s mad because he couldn’t get a judicial appointment after pulling the plug on a baby,” was the word going around uptown and in the Bronx. Barba knew this was the word going around because his mother told him.

“Why would you tell him that?” an exasperated Benson couldn’t help saying.

“Because he did a selfish thing on account of a selfish man.”

“Muñoz is a —”

“I’m not talking about Alex. I’m talking about Rafael’s father.”

“Then let Rafael heal,” she begged Lucia.

—

Daniel Zadon was indeed hiding out in a property owned by his late father on a tax-shelter island in the Southern Caribbean. The feds were going to pick him up within a week and deliver him to Manhattan. Benson half-jokingly asked Barba to return to his old job for a few weeks, since he was the only ADA she knew who could really nail a guy like Daniel to the wall.

“Might be an ethical problem for all the clients I’ve been defending the last five months,” he said.

At the office, Rita Calhoun stopped by with a thick folder that she dropped on Barba’s desk with a _thud_. “You see that?” she said. “That’s the 500 signatures you need to petition to run for Alex Muñoz’s old senate seat, plus 500 more for good measure, and the application forms.”

“I don’t live —”

“You did. Your old place was in that district. It hasn’t sold yet. Take it off the market. Primaries are in less than six weeks.”

“Rita, you’re grossly overstepping.”

“How long have we known each other? Have you ever known me not to overstep?”

“Alex Muñoz is running for Alex Muñoz’s old state senate seat too.”

“He’s been indicted for the murder of a police lieutenant. Racketeering and conspiracy are involved. Even Yelina believes he did this one.”

Barba opened the folder and examined the petition inside. “You realize,” he said, “this would make me look like an asshole?”

“First, you already are an asshole, so you’re on track in that respect. Second, this only involves campaigning in your district, and I have a friend with experience managing local campaigns, so you’re doing this.”

“Sure, and the papers won’t pick up the story of the Baby Killer ADA running for the state senate seat once occupied by the beloved senator who would have been mayor of New York City if only —”

“He murdered your wife’s friend, for God’s sake.”

“Rita, watch it.” He let out a laugh, one that was perhaps a bit too nervous. 

“You’re going to run for Muñoz’s old seat,” Rita said, slamming an open hand down over the petition, “and no matter what happens, in four years, you’re running for mayor of goddamn New York City.”


	20. Family

When Barba told Benson about Rita Calhoun’s plans for his future political career, her face lit up. “I’m going to look like an asshole,” he insisted. “I already told Rita, the papers will have a field day with me. You know what they called me when I was charged and indicted.”

Benson, who had an inch or so of height on him thanks to her shoes, placed a hand under his jaw, her thumb on his chin. “Rafa,” she said, “do it.”

“I don’t —”

“You are not what the papers, or McCoy, or Muñoz, or your mother, or your father said you were. Do it.”

Her words, “you are not what …”, echoed his grandmother, many years ago. And Olivia, he’d never forget, was the only person who told him — while on trial for murder — that he was still a good man.

If he could harness whatever luck had brought them back together after his awful lapses in judgment, he could run for Muñoz’s old senate seat.

Rita’s friend, the public relations coordinator who’d managed several local political campaigns, told him that he had until Monday to decide. For her, the campaign was potentially a resume-boosting challenge. Getting the Baby Killer ADA — a man who’d been in a two-year-long relationship with a detective who covered up the murder of a lieutenant, who in turn had been a close friend of the commanding officer with whom he was now romantically involved — elected into the state senate seat of the onetime best friend whose political career he’d helped bring down would surely earn her a place in PR heaven.

Barba promised her an answer on Monday.

On Saturday, he found himself home with Noah for a few hours while Benson attended another half-day federal institute. While Noah played with the no-less-than-forty toys he’d dragged from his room to the living room rug, Barba sat at the dining room table with his laptop, reviewing the materials Rita’s friend had sent to him.

“Are you going to be the mayor?” Noah asked, standing next to Barba, sidling in between Barba and the laptop, actually, and resting an elbow on the table.

Barba closed the computer. “Do you know what nosy means?” he asked.

“Yes,” Noah answered, clearly not transferring his knowledge of what nosy meant to the situation at hand.

“My friend wants me to run for state senate.”

“Oh, like on TV.”

“On TV?” Barba said.

“They talk about the Senate on TV.”

“That’s the senate for the whole country. The state senate makes laws for New York,” he said, trying to simplify the concept.

“I thought judges make laws.”

“Judges help decide how the law will be applied. If the state senate says there’s a minimum of five years in jail for elephants who steal all the ice cream, Eddie the Elephant’s lawyer might tell a judge that Eddie didn’t really eat all the ice cream, so he shouldn’t apply the law about eating all the ice cream, just the one about what happens if you eat only some of the ice cream. And if there’s no law about eating some of the ice cream, the judge and Eddie’s lawyer will —” He cut himself off, amused at Noah’s confusion, at his own attempt to explain law to a 6-year-old. “I’ll tell you what. You’ll learn more about this in law school.”

“Can I have ice cream?”

“It’s not even noon yet.”

“You eat snacks in the morning,” Noah told him.

“Can you at least wait an hour?”

“Then we’ll be having ice cream for lunch.”

“So how about we have ice cream for lunch, just this once?”

“We are not having ice cream for lunch!” the 6-year-old said.

“If you say so, Your Honor.”

“Your Honor?” Noah repeated, laughing.

“That’s your judgment. A very good one.”

“So can we have ice cream now?”

“No,” Barba enunciated, pushing his chair out.

“If you get the senator job will you let me eat ice cream in the morning?”

“No.”

He felt pins and needles near his heart, in his spirit, as he recognized what his relationship with Noah was becoming. For all the years he’d avoided that thing he’d secretly wanted — for fear of reconstructing even a sliver of his own past, for fear of becoming what he feared most — here it was, in front of him, like an undeserved bit of luck.

“Noah,” he said, “I love you, but no ice cream before noon.”

—

Daniel Zadon was picked up by the feds on the same Tuesday that Rafael Barba announced his candidacy for state senate. The feds brought Daniel to Rikers so that he could await trial in Manhattan. This time around, he was remanded. With Will dead and Cordelia in prison, he had no more connections, no one else to protect him.

“I need an experienced SVU prosecutor on this,” Benson told McCoy. “Give me anyone else, anyone but your mentor’s son.”

“This is Stone’s case, Stone’s job,” McCoy insisted.

“Then I’m having NYPD take you and your office to a higher court on account of —”

“Is this about Rafael?”

“This is about how long Daniel’s victims have been waiting for their day in court. This is about six months wasted because Stone couldn’t even get a judge to order Daniel to give up his passport. This is about an attorney who may have had to go into hiding because Daniel was free.”

“The appeals court will —”

“This is about,” she continued, “at least three murders that might not have happened if Daniel had a timely trial. And don’t get me started on your overzealous prosecution of Paul Margolis that landed him in prison for five years for a crime he didn’t commit. I don’t want Stone.”

“Captain,” McCoy said, “you —”

“Still Lieutenant until my official promotion next month, Mr. McCoy. I don’t want Stone. Give me someone better.”

She noticed McCoy squinting in the direction of the doorway, and turned around to see the ballplayer-turned=homicide-ADA-turned-special-prosecutor-turned-hasty-replacement himself. “I’ll, uh, leave you alone,” Stone said.

“You set up a meeting regarding the Zadon case,” McCoy said. “Since Lieutenant Benson is here, we might as well go ahead with it.”

“I’ve turned up six more victims in New York City,” Stone said, “four within the statute of limitations. Four new complaining witnesses went to Detective Carisi this morning. My assistant made sure of it.”

“Okay,” Benson said as flatly as she could.

“Liv, if you’d prefer the Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens SVU ADA on this, I’m sure Mr. McCoy can arrange that.”

“No.” Benson rubbed her forehead, wondering if she’d been impatient with Stone on account of the circumstances of his appointment to Barba’s former position. He’d had a good record in Chicago. The district attorney there had assured her that Stone had a reputation there as a talented homicide prosecutor. If she was able to give Carisi a chance to prove himself four years ago, maybe — maybe — she could do the same for Stone.

“How are we proceeding?” McCoy asked.

“I want separate trials for each count,” Stone said.

“That’s not necessarily something this office can afford.”

“His victims have been waiting for their day in court for years now. His sisters will never get theirs. If a single jury finds him not guilty on all five counts, we’re screwed.”

Stone looked to Benson for approval.

She nodded, and he continued.

“We do not want to risk a single verdict throwing all our work out the window.”

McCoy shrugged in Benson’s direction. “Well, Lieutenant, what do you say?”

“I say go for it. Whatever you need from SVU, just call. I’ll leave you two to work out the prosecutorial details.”

Stone settled into one of the chairs in front of McCoy’s desk and turned his head to look at Benson. “Thanks, Liv,” he said.

“We all deserve a second chance. Most of us.”

—

“Let’s address the elephant in the room first,” the smiling NY1 host said to Barba, who was seated to the left of her and her co-anchor on an evening city politics talk show.

Barba took a deep breath through his nose. He was ready. He’d prepared himself like an attorney prepares an unsavory witness.

“You are running for what was once Alex Muñoz’s senate seat. As many of our viewers know, you were working for the Manhattan DA as a special victims prosecutor five years ago when Muñoz was arrested, his promising mayoral campaign run into the ground only three days before the election. How do you think that will affect your campaign?”

“I’m running as someone who knows New York State statutes inside and out, better than any other candidate. I know how to use the law to get funding for schools and public services in my district,” Barba said. “I’d ask that the voters consider my record as a prosecutor rather than focusing on a political version of Page Six gossip.”

“Since you brought up your record as a prosecutor, let’s address that too. Just over six months ago, you were on trial for assisting in the death of a terminally ill infant, against the wishes of the infant’s father.”

“The details of that case are out there for everyone to comb through if they’d like. I believe — and I hope that my future constituents will read through the evidence and agree — that I was grossly overprosecuted by the Manhattan DA’s office.”

He was surprised to see the hosts nodding. Maybe not everyone in New York bought into the black-and-white Baby Killer ADA headlines.

“I can take what I learned from my awful experience,” he said, “and work towards making sure that zealous overprosecution is not a part of this state’s justice system.”

“Now, the other issue brought up in regards to your — frankly, very surprising — run for office is that although you lived in State Senate District 64 for six years, your current residence is outside the district.”

“My official primary residence is still in District 64,” he said, searching his mind for a response to the unexpected question. It was a strategy he’d learned in court: answer something, then think. He knew they were going to ask about Muñoz and the Householders, maybe even his interference in the case in Brooklyn years ago, what he’d done for the Abreus, but he thought he could get away with taking his old apartment back off the market and worrying about moving if he by some chance was elected to the office. “My family and I are” — _holy mother of_ … , his brain screamed at his vocal chords, _what are you doing_ — “looking to buy a condo or co-op when I sell my current place.”

Liv was going to kill him.

At least the show wasn’t on national TV.

At least the show wasn’t on a network affiliate, even, so maybe only a few hundred thousand New Yorkers were watching, maybe less, if there was a sob-inducing drama on another channel.

Maybe no one would care enough to post video of the exchange online the next day. Maybe no one was paying attention to the district race, even if it was Muñoz’s old seat.

Nevertheless, Liv was going to kill him.

Even if only a few hundred, or a few thousand, New Yorkers heard him say that his family was looking to buy a place in that district, Liv was almost certainly doing a double take as she watched from the couch at home.

In the cab on his way back, he answered a call from his campaign manager, whop was impressed by his performance, his thinking on the fly, his decision to emphasize his family. A second call came from his mother.

“Don’t say it,” he snapped before she could ask him what he meant by family.

“Mijo,” she said, “you did good.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It’s not fair what the papers and Mr. McCoy did to you.”

“Will you still say that when I lose?”

“You did good,” she repeated.

“Good night, Mami. I have to go explain to Liv why I said what I said tonight.”

“Buena suerte.”

“And … thank you for watching. It means a lot to me that you’re invested, even a little.”

He recalled that afternoon in the bar when Liv was the only one — ever, perhaps — to pick up on the implications of when I was seven, my mom said, “stick with Alex, he’ll be mayor of New York someday, something she’d never said about Rafael himself.

When he opened the door, he found her sitting on the couch, legs stretched out, wearing a tank top and pajama pants her laptop computer open on a pillow in her lap, reading glasses on. He removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie.

“Hello?” he prompted.

“Hold on, I’m busy.” She held up one finger in his direction. “Very important research.”

“I figured you might want to get up since I’ll be sleeping on this couch tonight.”

“Rafa,” she said with a phony pout that, between the reading glasses and the tank top and the legs stretched out on the couch had far-reaching effects that didn’t match the nature of his cable tv slip-up, “I’m looking for co-ops in State Senate District 64.”

He laughed. “Was that sarcastic or genuine?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.

She curled her legs in and motioned for him to sit. “Both,” she said, showing him her computer screen.

As she turned the screen towards him — oh, he was staring, wasn’t he, at her eyes behind her glasses, the curve of her breasts — he noticed the ring on her left hand. His grandmother’s ring.

His thoughts shifted again, this time to his grandmother’s words: _you will be_.

“How did you find it?” he asked.

You will be.

“I’m a trained detective, remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he said, leaning over to kiss her lips. “I thought you’d be furious when I got home.”

“Why, because you said we’re family? How could I be furious about that?” She closed the laptop and moved towards him, into his arms. “I was furious when you left. But everything you’ve been talking about these last few months sounds like a promise to stay.”

“Yes,” he said between kisses, “yes, it is, all of it. A promise. To stay.”

“Come on,” she said, smoothing her hands over his shoulders, “let’s turn in for the night.”

He started to loosen his tie. “No,” she said, winding her hands around his suspenders, “leave it on. I like your suits … a lot.” Now she was whispering in his ear. “Long before we got together, before we were friends, even, your suits were what did it for me.”

“That’s right, you said you “thought” about me,” he teased.

“Hey, Rafa, want to help me fulfill a particular … thought … I used to have about you? I’ll pay the dry cleaning bill.”

He nodded eagerly and followed her to the bedroom.

—

At midnight, Benson was sleeping. Barba kissed her cheek and rose out of bed to use the bathroom and put his now folded-up suit into a dry cleaning bag, saying a quick prayer to the patron saint of dry cleaning that all would be well.

He smiled at Olivia sleeping on her side of the bed, her side of what was now their bed, and said a real prayer to himself, one of gratitude and relief.

_You will be_ , he remembered again.


	21. Small Spark Inside

The night Barba won the Democratic primary for Alex Muñoz’s former state senate seat, they were home, just him and Benson and Noah, and Benson slapped a hand over her mouth in delighted shock and started to tear up. He’d only seen her cry a few times: the afternoon he left the DAs office, when they both thought he was leaving her for good, the night after he learned he’d never be a judge, and the night she realized that her late friend Mira had, in some sense, brought them together 19 years ago. He’d never seen tears of joy on her face, though, not before tonight.

Noah was already sleeping. He’d asked to stay up to watch the results, but Barba said no, not wanting to see disappointment in the boy’s eyes like the night he’d come home from Albany had had to explain to him that he wasn’t going to be a judge.

Benson’s expression was now halfway between laughter and tears. She removed her hand from her mouth and stretched her arms out to him. “Rafa,” she said, “Rafaaaaa, you did it.”

“Hey, now, there’s still an election to win,” he said, returning her embrace, ignoring the calls coming in on his cell phone atop the coffee table.

“It’s a historically democratic district.”

“Districts have flipped for less.”

“Whatever happens,” she promised, “I love you.”

“Even if I’m a slimeball defense attorney the rest of my life?”

“You are hardly a slimeball. Look at what you did for Paul. And listen, bask in your accomplishment for a minute here, will you?”

“All right, but I’ve got to answer these phone calls. And,” he said with a hint of a grumble, “Cuomo’s going to extend my commute by an hour so he can name a bridge after his dad.”

She gently shoved his shoulder. “In a few months, you’ll be able to advocate for commuters in your district.”

“I’ll be able to yell at the governor,” he said, feigning a dreamy disposition. “Though he hates McCoy, so I’m ambivalent. Only thing he and the mayor have ever agreed on was that McCoy was an asshole about how he handled my case.”

“And then gave your job to the special prosecutor in your case.”

“Right.”

“Rafa,” she said, his name on her lips like a promise, again, “I mean what I said before. Whatever happens now, I love you.”

—

The morning after he won the primary, Barba was back at work, preparing for court the next week. He’d managed to get a good plea deal for Paul Margolis: a 5-year suspended sentence on account of what the city had put him through nearly 20 years ago. If he made it through a year’s probation, he wouldn’t have to serve any time at all.

His current client wasn’t so lucky. She was facing 20 to life on what may have been a justifiable homicide, but McCoy, still following the lead of the daily papers, wanted a murder trial. Barba still hoped he’d be able to get a deal for 3 to 5 before the end of the week, avoiding trial altogether.

If he wasn’t elected to the state senate, he wouldn’t mind continuing with this line of work.

If he was elected, he’d try to get the city to stop indicting people on charges beyond what was reasonable.

There was a knock on his office door. “Come in,” he said, pushing his chair back carefully. He’d finally adjusted to the smaller office.

Laura Perez opened the door.

Barba hurried to embrace her, shutting the door behind them. “Estás seguro,” he said, “thank God.”

“As soon as I heard Daniel was being held without bail, tried on five separate counts, I called Santiago and Detective Eames,” she said.

He stepped back to look at her. She’d lost weight and gained a measure of additional sadness in her eyes, but she was smiling, the muscles on her face relaxed as if the 900-day headache she’d once confided in him about was finally vanishing. “My cousin had taken a job in Medellín, in Colombia,” she explained, “so I went to my aunt and uncle in Mexico City, and then when her work visa came through, I moved with her. I was lucky Daniel was found. My own visa was about to expire.”

“You were really worried for your life?” Barba asked.

“Once I knew what Will was up to, and the bodies started piling up, I knew I was in trouble. It’s unbelievable how much turned out to be … amateur, though. So, yes, I’m here to talk to Eames before I go back to Miami. I’m still selling the house, and I’m going to live with my former sister-in-law — Dara, who is so amazed at the work Olivia Benson did to make sure Daniel got pounded with charges — while I find out if I can return to my old job.”

“You need me to sit with you when you talk to Eames?”

“No, that’s okay, Santiago’s here. He’s acting as my attorney.”

“Good.”

She lowered her voice. “I think he’s got an amorcito or somebody in New York he wanted to visit anyway. Another attorney, I’ll bet. He doesn’t sleep with attorneys. Not usually.”

Barba laughed to himself, wondering if he owed Benson five dollars or a cheese danish if her fanfiction-derived theory turned out to be true. “He and I may have to have a talk about laying your heart out on the line.”

“Speaking of which, I hear you and Olivia are engaged.”

“Yes.”

“Rafioli is _real_ ,” she said with what was likely mock enthusiasm infused with a little bit of genuine enthusiasm. “I can’t believe it.”

“You’re in hiding for six months and the thing you’re most excited about is ‘Rafioli’?”

“I had my heart broken so many times that I needed Rafioli in ways I’m sure won’t make sense to you. You spend a decade with the Zadons, you lose your spirit, the small spark inside you, and then you _need_ a Rafioli to cheer for.”

“Are you angling for a wedding invite?” he teased.

“I’m angling for you to get elected to the lecherous pendejo’s state senate seat,” she said, “and then front row at your wedding.”

Barba smiled. “I’m glad to count you as a friend.”

“Same.”

“I’m sure your boss will have no problem taking you back, but we have a few openings here too. You should come work for us.”

“Miami’s my hometown. That’s where I need to be for a while.”

“I understand,” he said, embracing her again. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

“It’s too bad about Joseph,” she said, a distant look in her eyes. “He was a good man in some ways, but not good enough to stand up to Will and Cordelia, to support his sisters. I would have gone to the funeral if it was safe, but it wasn’t.”

“Hey,” he said, lightly touching her arm, “you want to surprise Rita?”

“She knew I was alive, you know. They couldn’t tell her where I was. As for you, I couldn’t let you in at all because of your connections to Daniel’s case. But Rita doesn’t know I’m back. Let’s go.”

“She’s the one who convinced me to run for office. Has it in her head that I’ll be mayor someday.”

“She’s right,” Laura said without missing a beat.

“Oh, come on, now.”

“I’m rooting for you, Rafi.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Back in February, you told me about your abuelita, and I got the feeling you didn’t have anybody else like that, not anymore. I was the same way. You need somebody who roots for you. So now you’ve got Rita, and Olivia, and me, at the very least.”

—

On the first Tuesday in November, a small crowd of supporters gathered the community room of Barba’s old building, where he’d lived before he’d moved in with Benson, which now housed his makeshift campaign headquarters. They had NY1 on the television and a few local news stations on guests’ smartphones. Most of the crowd was obsessively refreshing national congressional election results.

“They’ve only flipped two so far,” Barba heard someone grumble. “I’m getting an ulcer. Ulcers.”

“Three,” he heard a familiar voice behind him say. “But it’s 11 at night, was supposed to be something like at least 27 by now, and” — here he turned around to find Carisi scrolling on his smartphone with his thumb, waving the other hand frantically — “my 65-year-old ma’s already posting aggressive celebratory memes on Facebook.”

“Celebratory … how?” Barba asked cautiously.

“How d’you think?”

Barba noticed Santiago hovering around as well, mostly near Eddie, the only childhood friend who’d shown up. (Even Eddie couldn’t believe Barba’s nerve running for Alex’s old seat, but he admitted that maybe Alex deserved that sort of humiliation after snowing both of them over — maybe Yelina too — for two decades.) Lucia had apologetically declined, saying her heart couldn’t handle it if he lost.

As far as Barba knew, Santiago was still working in Miami, so this was the second time in just under two months he’d come up to New York.

“Carisi, come here,” Barba said, firmly grasping the detective’s arm and leading him to a secluded corner. “Santiago’s my friend Eddie’s cousin. Eddie and I have been friends for more than 40 years, so Santiago’s family too. He gave me a place to hide out for a few weeks after my trial. I know it’s none of my business, but don’t break his heart.”

“Yeah.” Carisi bit his lower lip. “It’s all right. It’s different this time, I think.”

A small regretful _how come it wasn’t different with me_ rose up in the back of his mind, but maybe Carisi’s change of heart had more to do with time, with finally coming to terms with who he was as he was pushing forty, than it did with Barba or any other person.

“Good.” Barba patted Carisi’s back. “Tread carefully.”

Noah was still awake — wide awake, overtired — determined to stay up until the official results came in. “You know I might lose,” Barba had said.

“But I want to be awake if you win,” Noah complained.

He and Benson had hoped that Noah would curl up in one of the chairs in the community room and doze off, but he bounced from adult to adult instead, finding a second and third and fourth wind every hour.

At 11:30, three local news stations reported that Rafael Barba was the new state senator for District 64. When the announcements came through, he saw pure joy, delight, in the faces of Captain Olivia Benson, his wife someday son, and her son, who’d maybe be his son one day too. They both ran over to embrace him.

His opponent’s concession call came in ten minutes later. For a while longer, Barba’s friends and very small campaign staff all toasted and thanked each other, and hugged and cheered. The party broke up a little after midnight.

As he and Benson returned to their apartment in a cab, Noah sleeping between them, Benson saying something about making an offer on the two-bedroom they’d found in the district he now represented in the state senate, he heard his grandmother’s words again:

_You will be._


	22. Epilogue: 2029

**October 2029** :

The guest of honor arrives at 6:45, fashionably late by only fifteen minutes. She’s been training her replacement all afternoon, and only got home to shower and change into an evening dress an hour and a half ago. She can’t let all the work she’s done, all the connections she’s built up between the feds and local police departments, fade away in her absence.

Her table is mostly full: Fin, Munch, and Cragen, who are all in their 70s but never really age (jokes about portraits in attics abound); Rollins and Dr. Al Pollack, a couple she’s forever surprised has made it to ten years (but she’s not surprised at all that Rollins was recently promoted to head up the NYPD forensics lab she’s been with since her younger daughter was born); and Santiago Garcia, the defense attorney most feared by the Manhattan DAs office. Three seats are empty for now.

She waves to Casey Novak and Alex Eames at the next table over, waves to other familiar faces who have passed through SVU in the last — is it really almost forty now? — years.

For the last forty years, nearly the length of Olivia Benson’s storied career, the turnover at Manhattan SVU has been too frequent. But it’s been improving steadily the last decade.

In the months before she was promoted into the federal job she’s held for more than ten years, she outlined a plan for more training, more classes, more required therapy sessions that were about more than just analysis. For the two years he headed up the unit before he retired, Fin started implementing her plan. Now, Lieutenant Dominick Carisi Jr. was enthusiastically continuing with their work.

The dopey mustachioed tall-haired detective Staten Island threw her way when she was severely understaffed is now the commanding officer of SVU.

Carisi shows up a few minutes after Benson sits down, pats Santiago on the shoulder, and sits beside him.

Their marriage is the only crackpot theory of Olivia Benson’s that she’s glad turned out to be right.

Carisi’s tired. His hair has gone entirely gray. But he’s happy, relaxed, comfortable.

“Amanda,” he says, waving at Rollins, “your lab owes me a couple results.”

“Stop _working_ ,” Rollins complains.

Carisi asks Fin how he’s been, chats with him about the grandkids for a minute, exchanges pleasantries with Munch and Cragen, and ignores Dr. Al like he always does. Benson doesn’t mind. She’s always taught Noah that not everyone is deserving of kindness. Polite acknowledgement, maybe, but you’ve got to pay attention to the specifics.

Rafael and Noah aren’t there yet, but Noah’s texted to promise they’re five minutes away and the celebration might as well get started, because it’s her night. _Not without you, sweet boy,_ she texts back, certain a wave of intense embarrassment will wash over him when he reads it.

“Where’s Hizzoner?” Munch asks. “I’m ready to give my speech, Captain, and I swear to you it’s only half roast.”

Benson flips him off. They all laugh.

“Noah couldn’t miss baseball practice,” she explains. “Not today. There’s scouts hanging around. The high school season doesn’t start until spring, but the college acceptances come through in April, so they do their clinics and “spring training” now.”

“Did he tell the scouts he was briefly coached by the illustrious Peter Stone?” Carisi says, a hint of a smirk forming on his lips.

“We don’t say that name out loud here,” Rollins reminds him.

Munch jokingly spits twice, grabs the salt shaker off the table, and throws salt over his shoulder.

Benson smiles, reminding herself how lucky she is for this table of people (even Dr. Al, she supposes, who made sure Lucia was well taken care of during a bypass surgery a few years ago) who have stuck around.

Stone went back to Chicago, to homicide, where was was — and still is, she hears — a much better fit.

“I read a story in the Ledger about baseballs being hit into the East River over by Gracie Mansion,” Santiago says.

“Shh,” Carisi warns, planting a kiss on his cheek, “there’s lots of alternate theories.”

“There’s really not,” Benson says. “Noah Porter Barba Benson is your only viable suspect for baseballs in the East River.”

They push boring green-and-purple salads around on their plates and pass the bread basket as Munch ascends the makeshift stage up front and prepares his introductory remarks. Barba and Noah come running in after a few more minutes.

Barba’s in a black suit, green tie to match her dress. Noah’s in a designer suit too, just like his father.

(Barba bought him his first real suit for his eighth birthday, a week before the adoption was made official. She remembered how Noah wore the suit that morning he held Barba’s hand in family court and a judge pronounced them father and son, and State Senator Rafael Barba cried in public for only the second time in his adult life.)

Barba kisses Benson’s lips and Noah pats her shoulder before they settle into their seats, and Munch launches into his introduction.

She catches Barba looking at her with pride shining in his eyes, and Noah too, as much pride as a 17-year-old might muster up for his mother.

When the speeches and retrospectives are done, she and Barba share a quick dance and guests snap pictures: they are, after all, Captain Olivia Benson, who’s revolutionized rape kit testing and funding in much of the country, and Mayor Rafael Barba, who in his legislative and executive roles has brought about changes in statutes that were once more about special interests and the assumptions of people who knew very little about law and ethics than they were about what was fair and right, who’d worked with the new governor to finally fix the subways.

They’re local heroes.

For a split second, they’re no longer at a 200-guest retirement party in a ballroom in lower Manhattan. They’re two people whose unlikely destinies brought them together on a terrible night thirty years ago. They’re two people who kept finding each other.

It’s not all that different from how she and Noah came to be a family. They found each other, and then for years after that, they kept finding each other. They haven’t stopped since.

Noah embraces his mother and tells her he loves her, a retirement gift from a teenager if there ever was one.

Barba embraces both of them.

Benson looks over at the old guard and swears they’ve all got something in their eyes.

They met on a terrible night thirty years ago. They met again two months later on a worse night.

And in the nearly thirteen years between that night when Barba’s eyes were red and his hands were shaking, when he opened the hand clenched into a fist in order to desperately clutch at hers, and the day they started working together, their lives orbited each other, through Mira Margolis and Roger Deimant and the Zadons, without either of them knowing.

They’re holding on to each other, Olivia Benson and Rafael Barba and Noah Porter Barba Benson (who’s going to have a hell of a time at the DMV in a few months with all those names, even though his dad is the mayor) in a corner of the dance floor, in lower Manhattan, in New York City, _their_ city, their own bizarre but perfect destiny.


End file.
